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The Ricky Martin creative team came prepared for whatever happens, for wherever they play. They delivered a consistent show night after night — no excuses, no “loco.”Martin, who has amassed six Grammy Awards among numerous other honors and 85 million albums in his career, has demanding fans around the world that expect and receive a show better than the last. So the creative team has to always top themselves, no matter where they go. Martin’s manager/creative producer Veikko Fuhrmann agrees with the conventional wisdom that touring south of the border can be more challenging, but he overcomes it, starting with the design. He’s learned from others who build tours for the U.S. for the relatively cookie-cutter arenas with success only to see it buckle under the weight of its gear when playing the varied landscape of Latin American countries. “I saw one that was not able to travel into Mexico, and as was suddenly too expensive and too heavy, and the tour lost out on a major market.” |
“I look at where the artist wants to go and design around whatever challenges there might be,” Fuhrmann says. “And I want the show to look the same indoor or outdoors.” When we spoke they had just done a big 45,000-seat show in Chile, but the creative team doesn’t always have that luxury of all that space.
Fuhrmann and company managed to come up with a plan that included his integrated set design that included risers, catwalks, and lifts. “It’s a very flexible show,” he explains. “We can’t go in with the newest equipment all the time, because it doesn’t exist locally sometimes.” So they lean on a good array of first-class lights that can be rented on the road and take with them a collection of “specialties.” He’s sure to anticipate any situation so that the unique look the team delivers looks the same. “Every photo of the stage wherever it is has to look the same — we want the continuity.”
High Energy Show, High Energy Gear
Richard Neville, Lighting Designer, says it’s been an incredible tour. “The fans are very passionate, and we’ve created a really interesting show for them. We light every song like it’s the biggest song.”
Neville has been working lights since high school and first worked for Martin managing his company when the artist asked him to design for him. At first it was a bunch of one-offs around the world including Spain and China. But for this tour, “we went back to the drawing board” to create a whole new show.
“It’s a high-energy show, yet it has so many nuances in the music that we were breaking down the cues almost to individual bars [of music],” Neville says, adding by his count there are over 2,000 cues. “Ricky has a great live band, and there’s a lot of people on stage. There’s great video too … so everything has to respond to everything else.”
For Neville, this means a creative tool kit. Among the newer items he says has helped is the Chauvet Professional’s Nexus 4×4 and Next NXT-1 panel fixtures. Neville and the creative team use them in various-sized wall configurations upstage, with additional NXT-1s used in the overhead truss. Neville also is using Chauvet’s Vesuvio RGBA LED fog machines and two Amhaze II foggers. “Being part of Ricky Martin’s crew is an exciting experience, and setting up this tour pushed our limits to create a magic show that complements Ricky’s talent,” he says.
“We are happy with the production, the lighting design, and we appreciate all the support Chauvet Professional has given us,” adds Fuhrmann. “Rehearsing in three different cities in the U.S. and Mexico in between Ricky’s engagement at The Voice Mexico was a challenge, but even more so was building the stage and programming all new content and lights in five days before opening night. This was the shortest ever production timeline we had for a Ricky Martin Show.”
Neville, of Mandylights (Sydney, Australia), adds: “The Nexus and NXT-1 gave us so many exciting visuals to incorporate into the show as lights, pixel-mapped effects and as scenic elements in their own right.”
“The goal of the show was to join lights, color and video with the music — and the Nexus and NXT-1 did a great job at this,” Lighting Director Federico “Churry” Lafuente of Light Years Productions (Mexico City) says. Originally the team was going to just use the Nexus panels, but Lafuente says when they saw video on the NXT-1 moving panels, they were intrigued with the possibilities and included them as well. “It’s been an amazing fixture. Its square shape, brightness and movement really stand out.”
The Nexus 4×4 panels replaced the video panel walls that were used in 2013. “Last year we had a video wall behind Ricky, but we wanted to be more diverse and go with something different, because we have a lot of other video screens in the show,” says Neville. “The Nexus was the perfect fixture to use in place of the video walls because aside from being incredibly bright — we ran it at only 20 percent — and having really cool colors, it also looks incredible on the stage when it isn’t running. The frosted body of the fixture takes light really well.”
The fixtures were programmed two different ways during the show. They were patched through the console as individual RGB cells for simple bumps, color effects and chases. At other times during the show, they were controlled via a media server to take video files as well as content from the large video screens over the stage.
Neville also credits the Next NXT-1 for being easy to program. “There were a lot of things to like about the NXT-1,” said Neville. “I was very impressed by how straightforward this fixture is in terms of control. A lot of similar fixtures have incredibly complicated channel maps.
“We wanted something that was a bit more dynamic,” Neville adds. The NXT-1s, he says, “offer an incredible amount of firepower, and we are able to stream video through it and do mash-up videos in addition to just fade it into the lighting. Overall, it’s allowing for more content.”
Neville’s approach is not throwing it all out there in a confusing visual cacophony. “I try to use whatever I have within the thematic design,” he says. “It’s important to have a visual identity, as it makes for a more interesting show.”
The Chauvet pieces “offer us more to play with, and every fixture works incredible hard, which we need,” Neville says. “It’s a big two-and-a-half hour show, and the music spans so many themes. We don’t ever want to repeat ourselves.”
Also new to the tool box are the Vari*Lite VL3015 Spots. “They have more output than what we were using previously, and offer more flexibility.”
The set list is pretty pat, he says, but because of Martin’s diverse, international following, certain songs are switched out depending on the continent. For example, Martin had a big Spanish-speaking hit in 1991 called “Dime que me Quieres.” The video, featuring a lot of motorcycle imagery, is a huge nostalgic-inducing moment in shows in Central and South America, but didn’t really break elsewhere; similarly, he had hits in Europe, Australia, and Japan that weren’t big elsewhere.
Servers that Serve
Neville compliments tour mate Alex Grierson, who handles video design and programing. “We collaborate a lot, and it’s good to create the content together, ensuring lighting and video elements come together and flow well.” The pair makes sure the two components don’t “compete,” and if a song is especially suited for lighting, the video is pulled back, and vice-versa.
Speaking of content, Fuhrman says that the two d3 Technologies 4×4 Pro Servers are “amazing” and tap into everything, are able to resize things as needed on the spot, and redo content to fit wherever they need to.
Video designer/programmer Alex Grierson is also bullish on the servers. “d3 has allowed us a great deal more creative freedom than we previously have had,” he says. “It’s faultless in its reliability, it is incredibly powerful, and is flexible in how we can control it.” He says it has made his job much easier, and was pleasantly surprised that the initial transfer only required an hour of programming on site.
The flexibility has been mission-critical. “We’ve done a bunch of festivals on this tour, and being able to make fairly large changes to output rasters and complex cuts and divisions to content have taken seconds as opposed to traditional systems that would normally require both a lot of setup initially in the server and a good chunk of time behind the console,” he says. “And creatively, we’ve been able to lower the total system latency and be able to add a bunch more treatments to camera input on this tour. Previously, effects happened on ME’s [Mix/Effects] from the switcher, and we never had any control over them, so transitions were clunky; there was no ability to have anything really set to time, and it was another thing the director had to worry about. d3 handles all the camera routing and output mapping and even controls the MatrixPro if there are any slightly custom camera configurations we need to do.
“I can’t say enough good things about d3,” Grierson concludes. “The product, the team, and the support are great.”
Neville, summing up the the tour itself, notes that “some of these people have been with him for 20 years. “It’s a family environment, and the music is just so fun you can go to town on it. Ricky has such a good stage presence, you have to match that [with the visuals].”
Monterrey-based rental company Audio Systems del Norte, SA de CV supplied the gear.
Ricky Martin 2014 Tour
Crew
Lighting Co: Audio Systems del Norte/Monterrey, Mexico
Lighting Designer: Richard Neville/Mandylights
Video/Lighting Programmer:
Alex Grierson/Mandylights
Touring Lighting Director:
Federico “Churry” Lafuente
Creative Producer/Stage Design:
Veikko Fuhrmann/Motion Music
Camera Director: Miguel Roldan
Gear
2 MA Lighting grandMA2 consoles
102 Chauvet Nexus 4×4 LED Panels
37 Chauvet NXT-1 Wash fixtures
44 Vari*Lite VL3015 Spot
16 Vari*Lite VL3500 Wash
24 Clay Paky Sharpys
12 Martin Atomic strobes
34 Molefay Duets (2 way)
7 Molefay 4 ways (2×2)
9 Maxi Brute 8x Par64s
8 Svoboda Batten 9 cells
2 MDG theOne Hazers
2 Martin AF1 Fans
4 Chauvet Vertical Foggers
2 d3 Technologies 4×4 Pro Servers
1 Lightware 16×16 DVI Matrix
1 Barco MatrixPro SDI 8×8 Matrix
2 Avitech Titan VC8004V Multiview
2 Barco ImagePro II units
