The Production Designer Turns to Upstaging for Set, Lighting and Video for Weezer’s Co-Headlining Tour with Panic! At the Disco
Production Designer Robb Jibson was in a quandary at the start of the summer. He had a design for a Weezer tour in place with all of his production elements: the set, lighting and video. But he was short on time and stuck with a budget. Even so, if there’s one thing Robb is good at, it’s accumulating friends in his home in the Midwest. So with paperwork and a glimpse of a plan, he hopped on his vintage Italian scooter and trekked out from his Chicago home to the cornfields outside of town. More specifically, to the Upstaging shop in Sycamore, IL.
“Here’s the thing about Upstaging. I can walk in there with a wacky production idea. They don’t bat an eye. Other people may not want to spend the time to do what it takes to help me, but these people — they embrace it, they just love theater. They eat this stuff up like it’s a dare! They want to help and boy did they bring my vision to reality,” says Jibson.
Fashionable Lighting
Robb had an idea to illuminate his lighting trusses, but not with typical truss toners. He wanted some kind of material — inside the truss behind the fixtures — that could be illuminated by LED. In short, he wanted a lighting system that could be an integral part of the set. That’s where Daric Bassan comes in. Daric is the shop manager, but he lives for concocting custom torms, trusses, and ingenious ways to make life simple for the touring technicians. You can lay any idea on this cat and he will have an answer on how to do something within 24 hours.
Bassan explains, “If someone has a cool idea, we are all over it. Especially if it’s practical, yet art. We are basically like big kids who want nothing more than to construct new things. Robb wanted an open-faced truss with no diagonals in it to obstruct his lights or the backing panels. The Tomcat stacking truss was the perfect solution, and Robb knew that we owned it. It was my gig to figure out how to make this happen.”
Bassan laid the truss on its back, as it would ride on temporary wheels. He fastened a sheet of Sintra PVC, which is a bendable foam board product, in a half circle inside the open-faced truss. To illuminate the 19 sticks of Sintra-laced truss, he mounted Saber LED strips along the edges facing in. These are double-wide rows of IP65-rated LEDs on a hard, thin strip that Upstaging manufacturers and sells.
Next, the Upstaging Fabrication crew cut holes in two places and mounted some poles for the lights that live in the truss to mount to. Each truss was fitted with Ayrton MagicBlade™R fixtures mounted to a single bar. The bars slid out for the show and in for safe travel, like a good pre-rig truss should. They lowered to the ground on their backs, were pushed to the truck and stood on end for travel. All of the trusses fit within a total of only 15 feet of truck space.
Beach Vibe Set
Next up was a walk across the Upstaging parking lot to the scenic shop. Robb sat down with Travis Shaffer, the set designer and operator of the fabrication department. Jibson had sold the band on a set that could look like a rickety wooden fence you see at the beach holding up the boardwalk, but that would not be practical for touring. The drummer was to be placed on the boardwalk, with a lifeguard standing behind him. Travis whipped out a quick design in AutoCAD and explained how they could build this easily with aluminum, as opposed to splintered wood, and it would be a sturdier structure. The set would be self-supporting, quickly breaking into pieces for travel. He could wrap the individual planks with textured vinyl to look like old weathered wood without paint, which would just scratch off in travel.
Shaffer explains the process, “We have a large format printer that can print on vinyl and a machine to precision-cut the pieces out to my spec. Once I designed what was needed structurally, I asked Robb to pick out some old wood patterns for the planks. We printed his chosen pieces out and wrapped the fence and lifeguard stand with the self-adhesive material.” Upstaging sent him out with some spare vinyl so if one got scratched, they simply wrapped another piece over the old one. The band themselves stood on a sandy-colored carpet.
Included in the set were some faux street lights manufactured by lighting historian Brian Shapinski, Upstaging’s resident tinkerer and designer of specialty lighting fixtures. Yes, they have such a guy for LD’s who require something a little bit different from what’s on the shelf.
But What About the Video?
Upstaging provides LED video walls, projection, cameras, media servers, and control elements for any size production. The company owns a plethora of LED panels ranging from the Martin Series of 10, 20 and 40mm sizes to various types of ROE Visual product.
Whatever they were going to use for an LED wall had to be able to manually split down the middle and separate for a different look for the opening act, Panic! At the Disco. To accommodate that need, Daric Bassan and his team designed a new I-Beam trolley system to manually hold and split the upstage LED wall. To work out the video needs, Robb met with Tony Thompson, master of the previz studio, and all things pixel-related at Upstaging.
“We talked about options,” says Thompson. “He clearly wanted a good high-res screen to span the scene behind his vertical trusses. We showed him the Roe Visual MC-7 HB. He liked the blackface product and the fact that it was the high brightness model, good for outdoor use.” The product is lightweight enough for people to manually split the screen easily. They assembled a 39 by 15.7 foot (WxH) wall for the tour. Behind the faux fence structure was a self-standing row of the lower resolution Vanish 25 tiles. These 1.2 meter squares were positioned upright, 13 across, stretching the video to the floor and giving the band the appearance of playing on the sand itself. Both of these products are also IP65-rated.
Topping it Off with a Lot of Blackmagic
“Robb came to us with this particular idea. He was keen on using a low profile camera. Not simply because of the price point, but because he didn’t want a clear depth of field when he was shooting the artist. He was looking for an image that was like an old school photo, where the background looked out of focus from the main person, as opposed to a Digital SLR camera many use today,” states Thompson.
They started seriously looking into Blackmagic gear and were liking what they saw, especially the Blackmagic Design Studio Cameras. Robb wanted three. While they were looking at the Blackmagic gear, they also came across the ATEM 2M/E Broadcast switcher and realized this was all they really needed to cut between cameras and media feeds from the Mbox server. Thompson compiled a list of all the necessary ancillary equipment they would need from Blackmagic to make the whole package complete and ready for state-of-the-art-touring. At this point, Robb was armed with information, and it was time to talk turkey with his longtime friend and Upstaging account rep, John Bahnick.
“Once we knew what equipment would cover Robb’s needs, we sat down to determine how that video package would fit us, now and in the future. We wound up upgrading a number of components to 4K so that the system would be versatile enough to do other projects in the future. Now it’s a totally 4K system. These unexpected upgrades put us over budget, but we considered it to be a worthwhile investment in our new video department because of the quality and price point of the gear,” Bahnick explains.
“We purchased the upgraded Blackmagic Switcher because it has enough features to cover video systems of all shapes and sizes. In fact, just after we made the purchase, I saw the same one being used out on a major arena tour. That convinced me we’d made a good choice. The same goes for the custom video rack we built. It easily covered Weezer’s needs, but will also work for other sized packages,” he adds.
In closing, John states, “The Blackmagic 4K cameras turned out to be a great product for this application. We had one of the Blackmagic executives at one of the shows, and he was really impressed with the way we were using the cameras and the results we were getting.”
In the end, Upstaging and Blackmagic cemented a relationship, and Robb Jibson couldn’t have been happier with how everything turned out.
