“Syncronorm means quality products with no compromise.” – Steve Bewley, Mandylights, 2021
We had the pleasure to speak with Steve, designer and director over at Mandylights, who gave us some glorious insight into the team’s tremendous work.
You have pre-programmed and visualized the show with Depence. Which features were of most benefit to you?
„Depence has been a game changer for our business and has allowed us to visualize, program and create stunning designs like never before. D2 really has filled a huge void that was missing in the industry and is now a piece of software that we use daily to help us create designs for concerts, architectural, corporate events, light art and much more.“
Any thoughts on the future of our industry and on how Depence comes into play?
„The future of our industry is very bright indeed as we use Depence more and more and push what it’s capable of we will see truly amazing results. As we are now able to visualize pretty much anything there is no limit to what we can create and put forward to our clients. I see D2 only getting better and better as it develops and that can only be a good thing for our industry, already we are seeing people using D2 in a variety of creative ways with stunning results.“
Do you see an advantage for your personal workflow? Which features are most convincing regarding your work?
„We absolutely love all of the features, we use everything from characters to importing 3d models and MVR files from vectorworks. The video features are simply amazing and the fact we can do green screen to create stunning virtual worlds is simply amazing. I could list all of the features here but I’ll simply say we use all of them and love them all!“
„Depence has transformed the quality of the pre visualising of our live performance shows in a way like never before. We really can show a client exactly how their show will look and using the software will save them hundreds of thousands in pre production fees as we can now do pretty much everything in the virtual world.“
At the festival, company Siyan who were supplying the house equipment, were running Depence, which allowed all incoming Lighting Designers to have the option to pre-visualize their show if required. The stage had 2 massive IMAG screens on either side, displaying a live camera feed, sent via NDI to the FOH which also allowed the placing of the video screen surface in Depence. Siyan provided a very detailed Depence file containing the Download Stage as well as the house rig. Mandylights then used this file to start pre-programming the Enter Shikari stage, which was transferred via MVR file support into Depence to program the whole rig, which just worked perfectly for them. Having the facility present at the actual FOH was a huge eyecatcher, too. Mandylights have invested heavily in both their UK and Australian offices, which sees exact replica state of the art Depence pre-viz studios on opposite sides of the world giving the company the ability to have 24 hour workflow.
Mandylights believe that with the right tools such as Depence, they now have the capability to save artists vast sums of money which otherwise would have been spent on lengthy production rehearsals. For the Enter Shikari performance Tom and Steve programmed the whole set inside the UK studio facility which meant they could also send renders of what they had done so far to the band. They knew that the production rehearsal space was not an exact copy of the Download festival stage, so the solution was to take the Depence system with them. In this way they could have the lighting, stage, house lighting rig, crowd etc. visualized on a large screen, so the band could have a look on the ongoing design process. The band members were simply blown away at how amazing the visualization looked, and on multiple occasions commented at how the technology and its capabilities has taken a massive leap forward. Mandylights comment: “It really was amazing to have them sat there with us and be able to say this is pretty much exactly how your show is going to look in the live environment.”
The import of NDI into Depence also was a massive help for this project and worked just perfectly. Mandylights were sending the video from a green hippo karst+ which allowed them to create a multitude of multi-faceted effects which a control by DMX alone cannot achieve.
Mandylights:
https://mandylights.com/
https://www.mandylightsu.com/
