16 Color STRIKE M accompany Skip The Use across European festivals

Lighting designer Nico Riot created a floor package of 16 Color STRIKE M fixtures from CHAUVET Professional, supplied by MPM of Lorraine, to maintain a consistent aesthetic for the French punk rock band across very different festival rigs in France and Belgium.

Skip The Use have toured the French and Belgian festival circuit this year, from Pic du Midi, at an altitude of around 2,865 m in the Pyrenees, to Terres du Son in the Touraine River Valley. Stages and technical rigs vary enormously from one event to the next, so lighting designer Nico Riot set himself one goal: to deliver a consistent visual experience for the audience at every show.

The challenge: maintaining consistency across changing rigs

His solution is a floor package comprising 16 CHAUVET Professional Color STRIKE M motorized strobe-wash fixtures, supplied by MPM of Lorraine.

I needed powerful fixtures that could match the festivals’ fully loaded rigs, so my shows would maintain a consistent look on any stage, and Color STRIKE M certainly delivers plenty of power. Keeping every look as stripped-back as possible while staying within budget, I am aiming for a timeless, elegant aesthetic, with a design distinctive enough to retain its identity even when the festival stages change, explains Riot.

Eight upstage and eight downstage

The fixtures are split evenly. The eight upstage units provide backlighting, saturate the red stage curtains with colour and, at key moments, illuminate the giant heart that forms part of the band’s set. The other eight, positioned downstage, are used to reinforce key lighting scenes, illuminate the band from a low angle and create classic strobe effects.

A five-colour palette

Riot keeps the palette simple. "There are actually only five colours in the show: open white, CTO, CTB, red and a pale red", he says. "I wanted to create a cohesive visual concept around red to reflect the album artwork and the visual identity Skip The Use has developed for this cycle".

Darkness as a design element

Dark spaces play a fundamental role in the design and are often combined with dimly lit fog. The interplay of light and shadow is used to accentuate the giant heart prop, which stands open and empty in the centre of the stage.

I carried that heart concept as far as I could across the rest of the rig. The band has an immense stage presence, so my goal was to create high-impact moments using the lighting without distracting from their performance, explains Riot.

After the festival season, Skip The Use will embark on a club tour starting at the Zénith in Paris.