Amr Diab at Wembley Arena
SXS provide technical production for Amr Diab, best selling middle eastern artist, at Wembley Arena. The production from SXS featured epic lighting, the latest video technology and the trimmings for an awesome arena production.
SXS were chosen as the client required a reliable, well-resourced one-stop provider who could fulfil the entire rider specification in a short time frame and within a fixed fee budget.
“Now in our 20th year, we are able to deliver on even the very largest shows with our in-house resources” says SXS founder, Johnny Palmer. “This allows our project handlers and producers to make promises to clients that they know will be delivered on time, in full and with a fun approach”
SXS provided a full production solution including lighting, truss, LED video walls, cameras, vision mix, CCU, backline, instrumentation, show comms, staffing, 3D visualisation and rigging plots.
Lighting consisted of an almost entirely Chauvet fixtures. Maverick hybrids were utilised for beam, spot and special effects. They were also used for some choreographer back-light effects. Palmer goes on to say: “We love the mavericks; in this one unit we can do so many different things. This is great for our incoming LD’s as they have a high degree of flexibility with the systems we provide. It also means that more unique looks can be created for support acts. Of course this is great for clients and guests as well as they can experience a wider range of looks, feels and emotions from the shows we deliver…Commercially the mavericks are good as well as it means we can reduce our fixture count, reduce the number of fixture personalities and reduce our load weights while increasing the quality of our shows.”
For base and wash effects Chauvet R2s were used, “These have become a staple for our team now. We love these fixtures as they are reasonably small, lightweight, pack a punch and we have a lot of them. For an LED fixture the colour rendition is surprisingly good and they allow for excellent photographic and video opportunities.”
The Amr Diab show was also the first time that the SXS team used the new Chauvet Strike P38 blinders. Palmer continues with “While we love traditional molefays, the soca and dimming infrastructure can be a little cumbersome. Chauvet’s new Strike P38 fixtures are an excellent replacement to molefays. The amber-shift effect gives a genuine appearance of tungsten but uses a fraction of the power and cable-weight.”
A full camera package was also provided using Black Magic’s new URSA Broadcast equipment. The SXS team have a stock of these which are ideally-suited to arena shows. “Black Magic have really nailed it with the URSA broadcast system.” Palmer goes on to say. “The integration between the Ursa control system, Atems and CCU give a serious camera solution at a price point that works well for these projects. Of course the lenses are critical to a quality image so we get the best – on this show we were running HJ22s and box lenses which gave broadcast grade image quality.”
The show features a high-resolution LED video wall backdrop on stage as well as more Lumio LED video wall for imag (live camera) screens. All provided from in-house SXS stocks. In total over 400 LED panels were provided for the show.
The SXS tream invite the opportunity to work with more promoters and tour managers doing UK and European shows and tours.
