For Lighting Designer, Tom Edwards, 2025 has been a year of bold moves and creative breakthroughs. Freshly freelance after nearly a decade with one of the UK’s leading production houses, Edwards has stepped into the unknown with a clear goal: to strike a better work-life balance while elevating his design portfolio. One of his first major solo ventures? An immersive headline show with Jamie XX at the brand-new LIDO Festival in London, as TPi’s Jacob Waite discovers…
You recently made the move to go freelance, what spurred this and how have you find acclimatising?
“I did! I’d worked at a company for almost seven years and achieved some amazing life goals. I think giving myself more free time was the goal, and I’ve found a really good work/life balance now that I couldn’t have achieved before. A lot of people have reached out to me to congratulate me and there’s plenty of exciting projects that are in the planning.”
What was the creative brief for this project?
“Jamie curated the whole lineup for LIDO Festival on the Saturday, which meant there was an opportunity to design something specifically for his headline performance that was completely different to anything that had done before. The creative brief from Daphnee Lanternier was to create a three sided box of video to display live content from five PTZ cameras that were placed around the audience and two wireless Sony PXW-FX9s roaming the crowd and following the dancers. The aim from the beginning was to immerse the crowd in the show as much as possible.”
How did you approach the lighting design for this one-off spectacle?
“After designing the maximum width and height of the video screens along with the trim height of the automated flown screen, I was able to start exploring what sort of space we had available for lighting and where I would start assigning fixtures. The brief was always to follow and compliment the huge daunting space onstage whilst still maintaining a picture perfect video cube.”
Which software did you use to draw and pre-visualise this project?
“Everything was drawn in Vectorworks Spotlight 2025 and rendered in Syncronorm Depence R4. I think this system works well and the process is so fast to export into Depence. I can have everything imported into Depence and be providing stunning renders to clients within a couple of hours.”
Walk us through the lighting rig… what fixtures and technologies stand out on this project and why?
“The lighting rig on stage was simplistic and uncomplicated, it contained short nosed par cans with CP62 lamps, JDC1s, Ayrton Cobras and Martin Professional MAC Axioms. BPM SFX provided nine Kvant lasers that lived on the front of the flown video screen. There were a further five towers that were all 3m high placed around the crowd that contained Martin Professional MAC Auras, Ayrton Cobras and Fine Art 1200C Strobes. The purpose of these was to help light the crowd for the cameras so we had an even spread of light. There were 0.5m mirror balls placed on each tower and a 1m mirrorball placed either side of the stage. The Cobras did a perfect job at lighting these up. I placed eight at FOH, two on each tower and four in the pit to get enough coverage on all the mirror balls. The par cans were fun to use because although there are a lot of fixtures that simulate tungsten, I don’t think there is still anything that beats it. I put 38 par cans and 43 GLP JDC1s lining the edge of the video which gave us a mix of old school and modern day fixtures on the downstage video edge and underneath the LED screen.”
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Who were the technical vendors, and what was it like collaborating with them on this project?
“Neg Earth Lights provided the automation and lighting for the main stage and Christie Lites provided lighting for the audience towers. 80six provided the video and camera package. This had to load in during one overnight and the house rig had to be completely removed due to the footprint of the flown ROE Visual LED meant that our time was fairly limited until doors. There were a lot of moving parts to this design, and we had been in rehearsals for three days which meant we had figured out the nuts and bolts to the design before it went to load in at LIDO Festival.”
What are some of your favourite looks and moments of the show and how were they created?
“The mirrorball moments were powerful and so was the moment where the screen was flown to its lowest point and had The xx perform under it. The glow from the video lit everyone on stage and the look was finished off nicely when the lasers came in to play and created a big wow moment for the crowd.
Did you and the wider production team face any challenges on this project?
“The biggest hurdle was to understand the maximum rigging height for the roof flown screen and finding a solution for the infrastructure supporting it to have as minimal depth so that we could get the flown video as high as possible. This was simply because it would dictate the trims for the upstage and side screens which needed to have fixtures placed under them. The team at Neg Earth Lights were amazing and found the best solution to getting as much trim in there as possible.”
What’s next for you?
“Jamie xx has some ongoing headline shows over in the US for some festivals and Under the K Bridge in New York which is a unique venue. After that I’m heading out to New Zealand for this amazing project called World of Wearable Art. There are also some ongoing projects that have shows coming up in October into next year.”
Jamie xx at LIDO Festival
Creative Director – Daphnee Lanternier
Lighting & Production Design – Tom Edwards
Video Director – Chase O’Black
Tour Director – Cameron Stewart
Tour Manager – Martijn De Jong
Production Manager – Pete Hutchinson
FOH Engineer – Michael Parker
Monitor Engineer – Joe Hawley
Stage Manager – Phil Taylor
Backline – Sam Hair
Production Coordinator – Molly Wright
