Goldfrapp on T4

Goldfrapp made their much anticipated return this year with their new album Seventh Tree. This month they performed some of the highlights of the album on Channel Four’s T4 Music, including their hits A&E and Happiness.

Will Charles, a veteran of television lighting with years of experience at the BBC, ITV and Channel 4 amongst others, was the LD for the special. We caught up with him to discuss the challenges of lighting such a unique band.

“I really wanted to use something different to the regular T4 shows, not just moving heads.” He said.

“I’d used LED lighting before and wanted to incorporate that into the show. I saw the LC2140 units at PLASA and then had a chance to learn more about them through Richard Martin lighting. They had just purchased quite a lot of them. It’s a nice tool, very well put together.

“The transparency was what I had had in mind, so I could use them as foreground pieces which the camera could shoot through.

“We had a circular set with the band inside, surrounded by the LC screens. On these we had floating ethereal images that were inspired by the music. For three of the songs the cameras tracked round the outside of the LC units, and filmed from inside for the other two.

“Each song looked individually different, largely through different colour pallets. The colour range on the units was great, and very bright.

“Another reason I chose the Martin units was because of the ease of rigging and that they are so light. We didn’t have a huge amount of set up time – we got in there at 7am, were recording by lunch, and finished by 6pm, so the fast and easy rigging was vital.

“The fact that the LC can rig both portrait and landscape was also excellent. When we got in there the director Chris Howe, who was instrumental in the look, decided to change things about a bit. The fact that they could easily flip from portrait to landscape was great.

“I had Oliver Lifely as operator and programming for the show and he was great.”

Richard Martin Lighting supplied the LC2140 while the MAC 250s, 300, 500s, 600s were all in house. For those of you who missed it, the great performance and spectacular lighting on the T4 Music special can be seen on YouTube.