If you are working for a touring act, chances are few people will spend over 100 bucks to see your show. And that’s for a name act with the best seats in the house. Hence, I have made a career out of making shows look big, for little money. And I have taught myself how to design alternative ways of building things that would normally cost a ton to fabricate. I have also retained relationships with certain vendors that appreciate my repeat business. They know on certain shows they can charge me full price for gear, but on others, they must help me out. And since the majority of my work is sealed with a handshake as opposed to a contract, I’m comfortable with my vendor friends.
Last fall, I designed a tour for an R&B talent named John Legend. His only request to the production designers submitting ideas was that the stage change looks every few songs. Soft goods would change, video elements may shift, etc. He had no idea what he wanted other than a beautiful stage that could morph into different looks with different songs. The problem was that the tour would be an intimate evening in a theater, where a maximum of 5,000 people per night could fit into the gig. That means that the artist wanted a lot, but had a set-in-stone budget. This particular artist graduated from Penn State with a degree in business. He knew where to draw the line on money. And, thankfully, I knew exactly how to spend it.
Chris Stinebrink is the production manager who first contacted me. I asked him a few questions about what he thought the artist wanted to see. Then he laid out exactly how much I was allowed to spend on a set, video and lighting package. The amount I could spend could be manipulated in many ways. If I got the video cheap enough, I could afford more lights. But if I cut a few lights, perhaps I could build the LED tape into the risers. No matter what I designed, it all had to fit in three trucks and cost X-amount, spread over eight weeks of shows.
The first thing I did was sketch out a hand-drawn scenic design. The band could be spread out on four generic risers, and I could put a stairway upstage center for the pop star to work. These risers are dirt-cheap to rent, but I needed a way to make them stand out from being normal. Some custom fascia panels with built-in LED tape along the front and sides could do the trick. But the pricing is tricky. To do this correctly, it would cost $5K for the panels to be manufactured correctly and another $5K for the LED tape itself. I reckon I have $5K total in the budget for these.
My solution was easy. We were in rehearsals for a week, right next door to a Lowes’ hardware store. I called Upstaging, and they got me a deal on the LED tape. Then it was simple enough for Chris to send the touring carpenter over to Lowes to get the wood and paint we needed to build riser fascias with the tape glued into some routed grooves. Of course, it wasn’t engineered to precision, but it worked every day.
In terms of video, I’m not a big fan of the generic rectangular TV sets that seem so commonplace, hanging upstage at most rock shows. I like to have panels that can move around and stagger heights for different songs. But renting a motion control system to move LED panels constantly was out of my budget, as were hi-def LED walls themselves. At times like this, I like to visit my past and pull out old ideas I had seen used over the years. This is when I thought about moving shoji panels and projecting on them. Shojis are basically panels of rice paper with artistic drawn scenery on them. They’ve been used for years in Asia to separate larger rooms into smaller ones. Now if I combined them into some sort of airwall hanger apparatus, I may be onto something.
What I came up with was eight custom Shoji panels measuring 14 by 6 feet (HxW) that hung on a series of traveler tracks. I needed simple travelers with no ropes or motors. A quick call over to Joe at Gallagher Staging solves everything. He quickly manufactures a simple metal piece that consists of five traveler tracks welded together into a single piece, which attaches to a stick of 20-inch truss. Then he rented it to me at an affordable price. Three 20K projectors on the front truss, some media servers and a video tech from PRG Nocturne finished it off. No automation necessary. The touring carp and a light guy would move the panels to various configurations during the show. With minimum practice, I had myself a giant 48-by-14-foot (WxH) video wall, all for $11,000 per week.
Multiple Light Sources
I’m one of those designers who tend to utilize many different light sources. Eight of these Sharpys, a dozen MAC Vipers, a plethora of Vari-Lites and a wide arrangement of moving LED heads is what I designed. But affording them was another story. I originally had about 60 MAC Aura fixtures included as my primary wash light for the stage. But they didn’t fit in the budget. That’s when someone turned me on to “The Rayzor.” These are smooth little LED moving heads. No bigger than a Mac 101, these Elation fixtures are RGBW and easily as bright as a PAR 64. And they are cheap. Not cheaply made — I never dropped a single fixture in two months — but cheap to rent. So I designed a ceiling of them over the stage. I spaced out 36 of these in 4-foot-square distances. I was able to build an entire roof over the stage with these things for the same price as renting four Vipers.
Behind the Shoji panels, I needed a unique light source that I could use as a reveal and bedazzle the audience. The previous month, Mark Fetto over at Morpheus Lights had sent me this new fixture (from Ayrton in France) called the Magic Panel. I knew right away that this fixture would be the newest great fad light on the market, so I ordered 18 of these to be placed on pipes upstage. To get these lights shown on the market so quickly, I was able to rent them for half price. All in all, I rented 80 moving lights and two techs for $19K per week, thus getting my entire production in just under budget.
