CHAUVET Lights Up Eric Clapton Performances

As Eric Clapton returns to the stage for a limited series of concerts, 39 CHAUVET Professional Nexus panels provided an engaging light and video design for his opening show on March 19 at Madison Square Garden in New York City.  

Despite the fact that Clapton announced his retirement from touring over a year ago, the Grammy-award-winning guitarist is performing shows in New York, Los Angeles, London, and Tokyo this year.

The light and video design, created by designer Dave Maxwell, used Nexus panels that were supplied by Upstaging, Inc. and used them to unify the seven sections of video wall.

“We positioned the Nexus panels on the main curves within our truss system,” said Maxwell. “When they’re placed symmetrically along the long winding curves, they help to emphasize and complement the length of the curves, which creates a more balanced look. The curves where the rear video is mounted are long and low, while the curves above them are wide and high.  Having a large number of Nexuses glowing on these curves frames the stage and provides great camera shots.” 

The video wall showed live camera shots for about half of the concert. The live shots were provided by a long lens camera at front of house, some handhelds, robocams and lipsticks placed at different parts of the venue. The Nexus panels from CHAUVET also displayed car chase scenes during pivotal songs of the show.

In addition, Maxwell created different geometric patterns by using varying numbers of the 16 20-watt LED cells on each Nexus panel.

“We did full inner and outer patterns at different points in the show,” he said. “At some points, we used just the four central LEDs of the Nexus panels to emulate the classic 4-cell blinder look, which fit the mood of some of the songs. I appreciated how the Nexus panels can be quickly manipulated into the lighting design with little programming time. Our design was there to support and honor over 50 years of great music — and the Nexus panels helped us do that.”