2005
Products: Versa TUBE, Versa TILE

Since 1974, production/lighting designer Jim Lenahan has been coming up with ever new and creative ways to visually present Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers on tour. This summer was no different as the band sold out virtually every date, playing as many favorites ("Breakdown,""Refugee,""Don't Come Around Here No More,""You Wreck Me,"etc.) as they could squeeze into each two-hour-plus show.

For this tour, Lenahan designed an innovative backdrop that incorporates 14 projection screens in a variety of geometric shapes (triangles, rectangles, etc.), each of which is framed by Versa TUBEs. Five vertical columns of Versa TILEs flank the screens on all sides.

Marty Wickman from CW Productions supplied the Element Labs Versa TUBEs and TILEs to the tour. "Jim showed me a spec with about three or four different concepts,"Wickman says. "Once he saw the TUBEs he just had to have them. Everyone I show them to has that reaction! Plus, the support from Element Labs has been phenomenal. Anything you need from these guys and they are there. They have just been amazing."

"I wanted something that looked like neon but that could change colors and that I could feed video to and do all kinds of different looks over the course of the evening-and the TUBEs do it all,"Lenahan says. "It looks great and works like a champ.

"Plus, the Versa TILEs do even more things than I thought they would,"he adds. "They can get so many gradations of smooth color."

The designer was also impressed with the video capability. "Being able to shrink down Quicktime movies to the size of the pixels we have gives us a lot more variety,"he says. "They're way hipper than I was expecting! I'm also really happy to get back to saturated color again. After using moving lights for so long, you start to think the only colors in the world are pastels. With the TILEs you get a really rich red or blue and, of course, they're also instant: instant on, instant off, and instant color change. There is no mechanical delay and they're bright as hell! They're dimmed down for most of the show. They're not running at 100% because they're actually too bright. But that's why God invented dimmers. They're great. I love them."

They columns consist of Versa TILEs that are five pixels wide by twenty five pixels high each with 10 5x5 panels per column. "Essentially, each video screen has a line of TUBEs around it and all of the TUBEs are controlled in banks,"explains Jeremy Hochman of Element Labs. "So if there is a video playing on one projection screen, there can be a complementary color or video of colors moving on the TUBEs around that specific screen. Sometimes the screens have images that are displayed from the computer that are just solid colors and gradients. Other times they have live video playing from cameras or just media being fed from a Catalyst server. So there are a variety of control pieces that work together to create a unified look."

The TILEs and the TUBEs are controlled by the same computer. "Because of the way the software was written and controlled, they can be doing extremely different things-they're not tied together,"Hochman explains. "They're also using the TILEs as a projection surface, in addition to just being a light source. Sometimes they have moving lights shining color off of them, in addition to playing video. So that shows how 'versatile' they are. They are using a combination of our standard one-meter length TUBEs as well as a 50-centimeter length to match their appropriate sizes because of all the angles that they have in the set."

All the TUBEs and TILEs are directly controlled via a 15"Apple Powerbook, which has a DVI Signal going into the Versa Drive D2 Processor, which supports real-time video input. Stuart White wrote the custom software for the computer. "We definitely pushed the limits with the Versa TUBEs on this show,"White says. "And I loved working with Jim Lenahan. He was pretty excited about the idea of writing custom software for what he wanted to do. Since the TUBEs are kind of being used as neon tubes, and each one of them was a different length, I had to write the software in such a way so that we could address all the TUBEs as one or separately. Also, I could make them all individual colors. Each side could be a completely different color, so we had to use a lot of DMX channels to do that."

The lighting is run from a Martin Maxxyz console, which Joel Young programmed. "He was great to work with,"White says. "With the five columns of TILEs, we used lots of different textures on them and the TILEs looked quite different from the TUBEs. We had some audio-controlled programming going on with the TUBEs and I wrote an algorithm so they could make it look like a big VU meter. It's a really cool design."

"The Versa TUBEs and TILEs are the most bulletproof things on this tour,"Lenahan says. "We very seldom have any problems with any of it. I'm totally happy with them."