“Convergence” can become tiresome to hear, but never truly gets overused in this day and age. It’s an appropriate term for what’s taken place between video and lighting as elements of live performances. The trend dates back to 1998 when Lighting & Sound Design (LSD) first had a private showing of the Icon M (Medusa) at the LDI show. It combined the Texas Instruments nanotechnology-based DMD (digital mirror device) and the automated yoke of an automated luminaire into a single fixture, with “soft” gobos. Even though the fixture was never mass-produced (it was used on a few tours, including Korn and one or two others), it aligned the industry into the realm of video, media servers and digital lighting.
Two years later, High End Systems developed a DMX-controlled media server — Catalyst — by putting an orbital mirror head on a projector and the race was on. Today, there are about half a dozen or more media server manufacturers competing for the convergence market. Since the late 1980s when Journey went on the road with video (they subsequently started Nocturne Video, still one of the biggest players in the touring video industry), video specialists have been autonomous and in complete charge of the video. However, lighting designers, programmers and directors can compete with the ability to switch video from the lighting console thanks to enhanced control onboard capability. Is this the demilitarized zone of event illumination?
One production designer, who has ventured into the convergence DMZ, related a recent experience that is a case in point. His design for a touring event in the round included a backdrop with several projection surfaces flowing together that would use video as much for illumination as for graphics. The system would have been complex but not envelope-stretching, using several projectors with edge-blending to create one panoramic image. The designer created several renderings, but before he could show them he got call from the production manager scrapping the idea. He thinks he knows why.
“The reason is because the mere mention of technology outside of the video crew’s comfort zone shook them so badly that they wanted to get rid of me,” he says. “Instead of calling and saying they didn’t think it would work or asking how it could work, they wanted to throw out the baby with the bath water. One of the comments that came out was that someone in the production camp thought that I approached the video from the perspective of a lighting guy. This is an example of how some video people feel threatened by ‘lighting people’ dealing with video elements.”
Roy Bennett, a production designer who has incorporated video into productions for the Dixie Chicks, Paul McCartney and others, says making video and lighting mesh well hinges on properly distributing responsibilities at the design stage. “There can be as many as three or four video artists on a single production,” he says. “I try to make the entire production fully integrated between lighting and video. That’s why I started designing stage sets in the first place: to avoid a clash between LDs and video artists. Philosophically speaking, I think video has become part of lighting, and video artists seem to agree that the whole production benefits from a single cohesive vision and control.”
Ben Richards, LD for Yes, Rob Thomas and Dream Theater, agrees, taking it one step further. “Video is light,” he says on a break from the Aerosmith tour. Richards says the convergence of video and lighting has been accelerated by digital technology, specifically the ability of ESP Vision’s to capture and manipulate video when designing a lighting show, and Apple’s Final Cut Pro, which has changed the equation between video and lighting specialists more than is often acknowledged. Richards points out that the vast majority of tours can’t budget for original video content and resort to stock footage. The ability to essentially post-produce raw and stock content in a program like that adds tremendous power to the lighting design.
It also adds to the LD’s bottom line, first by giving the designer more to offer, secondly by freeing up more time to actually do the work. Richards says he holed up for two straight weeks laying out the upcoming Rob Thomas tour, but that was a blink compared to what it would have taken without the technology. “I could have bought a console, I could have bought a media server,” he says. “But I had to buy one thing and that was the visualizer. It changes the way you do business.”
When an existing technology is confronted with a new and potentially supplanting one, a collision is understandable. When two technologies that can either compete or collaborate encounter one another, the result and the outcome are less predictable.
