If you know the lighting industry, you know Genesis as much for the band’s production values as for its music. In the early 1980s, the group was instrumental in the development of the first commercially available automated lighting system, the Vari*Lite VL1, by providing the funds and the impetus for its delivery. For that reason, Lighting Designer Patrick Woodroffe cites the band’s “history of putting on big, spectacular light shows” as one of the main reasons he enthusiastically approached the design for the latest tour, Turn It on Again. He and Stage Designer Mark Fisher knew that they were dealing with “people who were knowledgeable, experienced and prepared to support a big venture…with both money and commitment,” according to Woodroffe. But they also knew it would come with challenges.
“No project of this scale is ever really the same,” Woodroffe commented. “It involves different people, differ-ent expectations and different degrees of participation from the artists. Genesis has a history of…being very in-volved with the process.” Both Woodroffe and Fisher relished the idea of attacking a large-scale project.Woodroffe’s initial idea was to use large moving lights on masts arranged in a crescent behind the stage. But there was a caveat issued by the band. “The band made it clear that they wanted a design that was ‘not rock ‘n’ roll’ in appearance,” says Fisher. “What they meant by this was that they wanted something that was not domi-nated by loads of scrappy old trusses and a crudely hung rectangular video screen.”
Fisher drew up several sketches using various organic shapes and forms until he struck upon the image of a spiky conch shell. “The spines of the shell became Patrick’s lighting masts, and the more rounded forms of the shell became the video screens and other surfaces behind the band,” he says. “Over a period of weeks, this form evolved into the final design.”
The idea worked well because the designers were given the latitude to create a monstrous set that didn’t need to double as acting areas for the band. “This was never meant to be a stage that was a playground for the perform-ers, as so many other of these large-scale tours tend to be,” says Woodroffe. “I think that this probably gave Mark Fisher much more freedom in that he was able to work with all the elements of lighting, sound and video simply in terms of a pleasing composition, rather than having to leave large expanses of empty stage. All his energies could go into creating the spectacle around this very focused and intimate playing area.”
Fisher says that his designs always start with freehand drawings in a sketchbook, and this project was no excep-tion. Once the drawings are refined, and he has a good idea of the concept, he moves into CAD to build a 3-D model. It starts out simple, and then it gets more detailed.
“I’ve been working with 3-D AutoCAD since 1989 when working out designs, so I’m very relaxed with CAD,” Fisher says. Back at command central in the headquarters of Stufish, Fisher’s design studio, colleagues Adrian Mudd and Ric Lipson operate a rendering farm with 60 “high-end” computers where they render animations. “We use this as the basis for the animated visualizations that we use to get sign-off from the band,” Fisher says. “At some stage, I hand my model on to be worked up into the final production model. On this project, my model was picked up and developed, first by Ray Winkler, then by Jeremy Lloyd. Jeremy picked up my CAD model, which set out the controlling dimensions for most of the design, but which left a lot of the design and all of the details to be resolved. He worked directly with the band and with the scenery vendors to develop the fi-nal design model.”
As the project progressed, Lloyd developed a close relationship with the band, and Fisher “kept out of the way.” Lloyd then worked directly with the band, to create the stage design for the indoor show.”
Woodroffe also strived for a natural approach to the design. “I try to make it as organic a process as I can, but based on quite a practical and disciplined way of working,” he says. “We had an idea of what we wanted in terms of a generic shopping list — large wash lights and bright profiles for the tall towers, smaller wash lights over the stage, even smaller fixtures along the runways, large searchlights to cut through the screen and so on. Then the spec sort of wrote itself, depending on what was available at the time.”
Woodroffe recognizes the advantages that technology can afford a designer. “This is a golden time for lighting designers with so many choices of bright, reliable, automated fixtures with interesting features,” he says. “Some of the moving lights we had never worked with before — the Little Big Lights, the Robe Profiles, the Coemar Washes, for example. But they all worked great.”
Dave Hill, who codesigned the show with Woodroffe, also programmed the show. Woodroffe and Hill have de-veloped a shorthand method of communication based on “many years and many projects.” Woodroffe praises Hill’s work as having “an enormous amount of skill and detail, (that was) absolutely in tune and in time with the music.”
With a projection surface that includes over nine million pixels, video obviously plays a huge part in this pro-duction. But it was carefully crafted, both in the design and in the programming aspects, to blend in with the lighting and set. “The video was designed to be the focus at times and at others to provide simpler more amor-phous backgrounds,” Woodroffe comments. “Dave Hill carefully matched colors and textures so that the overall impression was one of a series of seamless light paintings. The (video) programming of the show was done by Sam Pattison and his team from One Dot Zero.”
Associate Lighting Designer Adam Bassett “pulled together all the threads,” according to Woodroffe, and orga-nized the “complicated production” in the early part of the project. He then acted as a sort of theatrical assistant for Hill and Woodroffe in the rehearsal process. Woodroffe also credited Dave Ridgeway and his crew from Neg Earth with taking care of the details of the rigging and setting up and taking down the complex lighting system night after night on two continents “with little fuss.”
For the construction of the unique set, Fisher relied on “the usual suspects” — Brilliant Stages, Tomcat, StageCo, XL-Video and Frederic Opsomer at Barco/Innovative Designs. “We’ve worked with them all on many projects in the past,” Fisher says. “Our LED video experiments with Frederic Opsomer go back to (the U2 tour) Popmart in 1997.”
Though Jeremy Lloyd ended up handling the project for Stufish, Fisher says that he enjoyed it, and he “had a great time working with the band.” “We enjoyed a very professional relationship with all the members of the Genesis production team, and a creative relationship with the lighting and video teams,” he says, “all of which made the project a happy and successful experience.”
Woodroffe was well pleased with the results, and he is highly complimentary of the team. “The whole produc-tion was one of the most organized, but fluid, that I’ve ever worked on. Steve Jones and Howard Hopkins were the production managers for the tour and led the whole thing with razor sharp efficiency, but also with huge style and good humor. They also managed to pull off back-to-back shows with a production as big as any I’ve seen.”
CREW
Lighting Designer: Patrick Woodroffe
Codesigner/Programmer/Director: Dave Hill
Associate Lighting Designer: Adam Bassett
Stage Design: Mark Fisher
Design Development: Ray Winkler
Design Development/Technical Design: Jeremy Lloyd
Animation & 3-D Visuals: Adrian Mudd and Rick Lipson
Studio Project Manager: Lucy Davenport
Production Managers: Steve Jones and Howard Hopkins
Lighting Supplier: Neg Earth (UK)
Universal Team:
Crew Chief: Jonathan Sellers
Data System Architect: Andy Porter
FOH Mixer: Luke Radin
Head Electrician: Jim Mills
Big Lites: Simon Lake
Head Tech: Victor Livingstone
Rigging: Ganna Lupini
Advance A Team:
Crew Chief: Brian Wares
Head Electrician: Matt Burden
Technicians: Katie Flanders, Meic Heggett
Spotlights: Bob Batty
Rigging: Hayden Corps
Advance B Team:
Crew Chief: Paul Kell
Head Electrician: Bill Frostman
Technicians: Steve Shipman,
Roan Lo-A-Njoe
Spotlights: Ben Howell
Rigging: Gavin Boucher
GEAR
87 Coemar Infinity Wash fixtures
6 CS6
2 High End Systems F100 fog machines
24 High End Systems Studio Beams 6 80K Hungaoflashes
7 i-Pix Satellites
2 MA Lighting grandMA consoles
26 Martin Atomic 3K Strobes
37 Robe ColorSpot 2500 AT
8 Strong 2K Super Troupers
36 Vari*Lite VL5
14 Vari*Lite VL6
17 Zap Technologies Big Lites
