Live Events

Kinesys just rocks it with Mayday

Wed, 28 Sep 2016 10:19

Mayday. Photo: B’IN MUSIC


Taiwanese rock superstars Mayday are on the road in Asia with a large production including 56 axes of Kinesys automation – provided by rental and technical production specialist B’IN Live, who are headquartered in Taiwan with bases in China and Hong Kong.

The epic lighting, visual and set design was created by Leroy Bennet and Seven Designs from Los Angeles – well known for their imagination and style as well as interesting and provocative designs ... of which this is no exception!

B’IN Live – formed in 2014 with the amalgamation of six high level technical specialist companies into a super-production company – provides full technical infrastructures and services, incorporating sound, lighting, video, rigging, automation, set and scenic plus staging and power.

Technical Director and Production Manager for this Just Rock It tour is B’IN Live’s Jeffrey Soon and he is co-ordinating all the shows on the current tour which runs until October.

Kinesys Elevation drives are used to move a number of lighting and video elements which include a 25 metre wide by 6 metre tall 12 mm LED screen weighing 5 tonnes which moves up and down on eight 1 tonne Liftket motors being driven by Kinesys Elevation vari-speed hoist controllers.

Forty Elevation controllers alone are used to move 10 lighting pods in the roof over the stage. Each of which is loaded with 9 x Magic Panel 5x5 LED matrix moving lights. These pods are each suspended on four Elevation controlled half-tonne Liftkets … they needed to be able to rotate on all axes to achieve the variation of dynamic looks that Leroy wanted.

The final eight Kinesys Elevations are used on four straight trusses also above the stage, which also move up and down. Each of these is loaded with 26 x Magic Blade type fixtures … these account for just a small percentage of a total of nearly 600 Magic Blade style fixtures on the whole lighting plot!

There are around 30 automation cues in the set. These were initially programmed onto a Kinesys K2 system by B’IN Live’s Connie Cheng during the design and rehearsal stage and the showfile was then transferred to a Kinesys Vector computer for the tour, where Cheng is also the operator.

B’IN Live now has over 50 Elevation units, 38 x 1 tonne and 15 x half-tonne Liftkets and Kinesys K2 and Vector control systems.

For this tour they have also sub-hired 10 Elevation controllers from Impact Hong Kong.

The tour producer is Ocean Chou and joining Soon on the production team are Production Manager Jason Chang; Artistic Directors Peter Aquinde, Monster Hsieh and Ali Chen; Lighting Programmers Jason Baeri and Brian Jenkins from Seven Designs and operators Jimmy Shih & King Li; Media server / Video Operator and Programmer Loren Barton and Animation specialists Spring Yang and Chris Chen.

FOH sound is mixed by Matsunaga Tetsuya, the Monitor Engineer is ohmixer Chuang, lasers are designed by Jay Hsia … and the Assistant Director is Jasmine Liu.