Light Initiative’s bespoke LED PAR can frames give Mumford & Sons the edge

Lighting designer Ed Warren has commissioned a large number of pioneering LED PAR can frames from LED design and manufacture house Light Initiative (LI) to add an extra punch to his design for Mumford & Sons’ world tour and headline festival dates.

The folk rockers have been traversing the globe in support of their latest number- one album ‘Wilder Mind’. To reflect the slightly edgier sound of their new material, Warren took his usual tungsten-based design to the next level. To do this the designer incorporated some new elements such as strobes, unusual colour contrasting and LED.

“To maintain the Mumford vibe amidst all the new tricks, I decided to use a back wall of 120 PAR cans positioned in a 10-fixture wide by 12-fixture high grid,” explains Warren. “However I felt it’d get old quickly if all they did was flash on and off for a whole set, so came up with a way of making the PARs change colour using a removable ring of LED tape.

Light Initiative created 120 of the LED products, named ‘Halo 64′, building them on robust chrome frames.

“The Halo64 product we ended up creating was a derivation of a previous bout of creativity a couple of years ago which then stalled,” says Bryn Williams, Light Initiative’s founder and creative director. “Working with Ed was great as his clear vision helped us take a working concept through to a polished end product which exactly suited his needs.”

Warren agrees: “The frames are very solid and worked better than expected from the off. Output and looks-wise they are everything I imagined. With plenty of haze in the air they give a very unique, eerie glow.

“LI has also developed them further to make them more adaptable to changing weather conditions, which has been great for Mumford & Sons’ outdoor festival shows.”

Warren and LI are also working together to expand the Halo range to a high- resolution pixel, HaloPIX, with increased pixel-mapping capability.

“At the moment, I’m using the Chamsys console’s in-built pixel mapper to create shapes but there’s nothing too elaborate going on – just a few sweeps, strobe effects, fades,” explains Warren. “However the updated version will have individual control of each pixel around the ring, so a wall of rings can become a higher resolution wall of pixels capable of more intricate mapping and effects.”

Light Initiative will also be developing the product with its IntelliFLEX control system to offer increased versatility. “We’re very excited about our groundbreaking new system of control, which converges both lighting and video into a single control entity, and will be ideally suited to the upcoming HaloPIX range,” continues Williams.

Warren and LI’s Halo 64 products are set to evolve over the coming months, with a 3-channel version, a pixelated version and a white high power LED strobe version HaloStrobe, all available in a variety of black, white or silver frames. There are also plans to release the frames as stand-alone units that can be clipped together.

Mumford and Sons are set to embark on a UK arena tour this November and December, with dates including Manchester, Sheffield and London.