Most lighting-related companies are named after their founders or with initials, descriptors or suitably tech-sounding neologisms. Only one—Walter Productions—takes its moniker from a vintage fire truck.
“Walter” began life in 1963 as an airport crash truck manufactured by the late Walter Motor Truck Company in Voorheesville, NY, a suburb of Albany. The truck first saw duty at Luke Air Force Base in Glendale, AZ, near Phoenix, standing by as pilot trainees landed their F-16 fighter jets (and now F-35s). The vehicle then moved to the fire department of New River, Ariz., where it finished its working years as a community firefighter.
Walter retired to Jerome, AZ, home of the Jerome Jamboree, which is to Volkswagen buses what Sturgis is to Harleys. Every year, hundreds of the venerable vehicles once favored by hippies and large families swarm the rural town, expanding its population (normally less than 500) considerably.
From Fire Engine…
Phoenix physician Kirk Strawn spied Walter on his first visit to the Jamboree. Perhaps inspired by all those Vee-dubs, Strawn immediately saw that Walter’s boxy body and large wheelbase resembled a giant VW bus. He traded his own unusual 1979 VW camper for the fire engine and had it transported to the “Walter Dome,” an old lumberyard in Scottsdale.
Strawn gathered a growing group of like-minded creative spirits who became known as Tribe Walter. More madcap than Mad Max, the collective of artists, mechanics, lighting designers, fabricators and welders applied their magic into supersizing Walter into a 2:1 scale VW bus. At 19,500 pounds, it’s about 31 feet long, eight feet wide and 13 feet tall. You can get a taste of the process at walterthebus.com.
DJ-ready, it features a 360°, 30,000-watt sound system with dozens of speakers lining the bottom edge, a 7,000-watt generator, wireless audio/lighting sync, and 20,000+ colored LEDs. With 22 quarts of oil, 27 gallons of coolant and 40 gallons of fuel, it can carry 50 people if they’re very friendly. To keep them cool, there’s an onboard misting system (it’s based in Phoenix, after all).
…to Burning Man
So, what do you do with the world’s largest VW bus, a self-contained rolling DJ-show and party barge? Burning Man! In its first appearance in 2009, at the famed gathering in the Nevada desert, Walter the Bus was a big hit. Strawn continued taking it to the annual festival while building an armada of oversized entertainment-themed vehicles and traveling venues.
The bus was joined by Big Red, a double scale VW beetle, and Heathen, also built on a fire truck chassis, which, with added huge horns, appears as a neon spectral longhorn steer capable of shooting 20-pound bursts of propane fire donuts into the air. The Peace Train is a set of three linked trailers, each one a themed party room replete with programmed lights and sound. Before long, requests came in from other festivals, parties and corporate events. By 2013, Walter Productions was born.
The Kalliope Stage
The flagship of the fleet is Kalliope, a massive sound stage built on a 1969 Fruehauf flatbed semi-trailer and named after the Greek muse of music and dance. With its built-in DJ station, huge sound system, synchronized lights and lasers, and 20 fire cannons that can be commanded manually or by a signal-processing unit that can shoot flames based on the music’s rhythms and bass lines, the platform can offer a throbbing, pulsing, retina-searing experience for up to 10,000 revelers. Even superstar DJ Skrillex has done a set on Kalliope.
Students at Purdue University’s Propulsion Design, Build and Test class have helped the company with fire effects, and they’ve also recruited the Iowa state champion welder Kurtis Rice.
“Each event is different,” explains technical director Ryan Tucknott. “For some, we bring everything, including techs and talent. Others might have just Kalliope or just Big Red and Walter, and we might use talent provided by the event. It comes down to availability and budgets and what makes sense for a specific occasion. Each vehicle has its own personality, and we treat them almost as people.” Though most are street legal and have legitimate license plates, the company doesn’t often drive them on public roads because of varying ordinances for height, weight, seat belts and such. They are, however, driven around festival grounds doing pop-up parties and, true to the company’s communitarian ethic, giving rides to festival-goers.
Trouble-Free Load-Ins
“Everything is pre-wired,” Tucknott points out, “so we can have sound going within 30 minutes and be fully set up in a little over two hours. The sound and lighting are wirelessly synchronized. For DMX, we use Wireless Solutions on all of the vehicles. They’re amazing — Kalliope can serve as the transmitting vehicle with a front-of-house position either on board or out at the traditional place, so it can synchronize sound and effects with any or all of the other vehicles. It becomes an immersive, interactive experience for the audience. In fact, we even encourage people from the crowd to come up and push the fire buttons, explore the vehicles, stand with the DJ and have a VIP backstage experience they wouldn’t normally have. If something gets broken, it gives us a chance to improve on it in the next iteration.”
Wireless Control Setup
For the console and controllers, Tucknott favors ChamSys. “Part of our concept is that the show is 100 percent mobile. For instance, at Burning Man, we move the whole convoy around the grounds and do impromptu shows. ChamSys allows us to have wireless iPad control on the go. We use Swisson onboard DMX playback units that automatically come on when a particular vehicle gets out of range of the main signal. And we have thousands of feet of LED tape from QL Light Company.”
Walter Productions is on a roll, now having done events for some of the country’s biggest and best known companies; the Bonnaroo, Wakarusa, Life Is Beautiful, Sonic Bloom, FORM Arcosanti and the Electric Daisy Carnival (EDC) festivals; and many special events, including the Phoenix and Palm Springs Pride festivals, Rock ‘n’ Roll Marathons, New Year’s Eve bashes and Life Cube Las Vegas. The company is putting the finishing touches on a large-scale house that makes adults relatively the size of children and a new vehicle called Mona Lisa that promises to be even more stunning than anything in its current fleet.
For more information and images, go to walterproductions.com, www.walterthebus.com and www.facebook.com/heathenskalliope.
