Folkstone
Diario Di Un Ultimo (live dvd)
live dvd direction – lighting & visuals design
Folkstone is a folk-rock band from Italy. They play a catchy rock surrounded by folk instruments like bagpipes, whistles, bouzouki and hurdy-gurdy.
It’s been a while since I started working with them, taking care of the lighting show and, after a few months, integrating the visual aspect of the show with ledwalls and custom made visual content as animated logos and atmospheric backgrounds that supports the mood and the lyrics of each song.
In October 2018 we filmed this live performance at the “Latteria Molloy” venue in Brescia, which became the bonus live DVD of the new full-length album of the band, released a few months later, in March 2019.
The lighting setup
For this live performance, I’ve integrated a lighting project to the venue setup, to highlight all the 9 members on stage, focusing on backlight effects, without affecting the front illumination because of the cameras of course.
The floor setup that we implemented for the recordings was pretty simple due to space reasons but I chose small but powerful fixtures as LED bars, LED blinders and par cans.
The LED bars were used to bring some backlight to the musicians, supporting the atmpsphere of the songs and matching the colors of the visuals.
The blinders on the floor were perfect for presentations, epicness of the singer or solo musicians and for beating “tempo” on very rythmic songs.
The aim was to create a foggy, epic and ancient atmosphere in wich the people could feel as being into a celtic/viking tavern having fun and enjoying a different historic era.
The visuals
Each song of the setlist represented a story, a journey, with different feelings and atmosphere, and I wanted for each of them to have a completely different look of the stage, so we rented a high resolution LED wall that chould fit the whole stage background.
Since not all songs had their own official videoclip, I produced a different visual for each of the remaining tracks, trying to express the meaning of the lyrics in an easy and minimal way, to preserve the attention on the musicians, having also a mood change on the whole stage.
Some nice examples of the visuals can be listed below:
Song name (timing on the video at the end of this page)
Supernova (29:45): for this song i create a supernova in CGI, evolving together with the song from an ice-blue halo, to a white one for the bridge of the song, ending to a red big halo, similar to the colors a real supernova life.
Asia (34:19): the topic of this song is pretty easy to discover. For this, I chose to represent a huge rotating rising sun centered on the drummer, with the band’s name splitted in 2 parts (Folk – Stone), to fill the spaces between the sun rays. For the whole song, iconic elements from this continent faded in and out to give more dynamics and follow the lyrics, for example bamboo trees, pagodas, lotus flowers, etc. (first picture on the right)
On other songs, by the way, I chose to not develop a dedicated video, but an animated backdrop instead, showing a big logo of the band, contextualized to the song, to give a less “theatrical” look and a more rock’n’roll imprint. For example “Prua Contro Il Nulla” which means literally “bow against nothing”, had a background of a stomry sea with thunders and flashes, with the band logo flashing as the thunders were hitting it (second picture on the right). Another example is the image above this paragraphs, which shows the band’s logo set on fire.
The video
The release
This DVD is released as bonus disc of the last album of the band, called “Diario Di Un Ultimo”.
Release on March, 8th 2019 by Folkstone Records
Executive produced: Faustini Produzioni
Directed by ChaoticBench and Luca Rapuzzi.
Filmed by Luca Rapuzzi
Lighting project and visuals by ChaoticBench
Sound recorded by Carlo Fappani and Ronnie Amighetti
Mixed by Luciano Graffi and Ronnie Amighetti at “Le KlubHaus” Studio
Ledwall: Audio&Luci.com
Venue: Latteria Molloy, Brescia (IT)