LED ZEPPELIN - Kahuna Responsible For Visual Spectacle At Reunion Show
January 23, 2008, 16 years ago
The following report is courtesy of Screenafrica.com:
As Jimmy Page, Robert Plant, John Paul Jones, and Jason Bonham opened the LED ZEPPELIN reunion show - a tribute to Ahmet Ertegun, the late founder of Atlantic Records and mentor to many music icons - they launched into 'Good Times Bad Times' against a 28-meter by 10-meter backdrop featuring video mixed on a Snell & Wilcox Kahuna SD/HD multiformat production switcher.
For this, the first song on the band's 1969 debut album, and the next 15 songs that rocked London's O2 arena on Dec. 10, 2007, Concert Video Director Dick Carruthers used the Kahuna to create the visual spectacle envisioned by the legendary troupe for its stage return.
"Led Zeppelin songs vary massively from gentle, tender blues to knock-your-head-off songs like 'Kashmir' and 'Whole Lotta Love,' and to reflect this the Kahuna allowed us to create and apply a variety of beautiful textures perfectly suited to what each song was about," said Carruthers, who mixed video from the Front of House position."The Kahuna is unparalleled in terms of its quality and what it can achieve technically, and that's only half the story because we also had the support of Snell & Wilcox behind us. We programmed layers of effects and mapped them into 20 or 30 buttons, subdivided by song, so that I could recall each one instantaneously. It was a 'Wizard of Oz' kind of thing, and the resulting pictures on stage were mind blowing."
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