Lighting Designer Matt Mills just wrapped up a tour around the U.S. with the nu metal band KoRn from California. Due to international travel restrictions the booked LD for KoRn was unable to join the tour in U.S. Stepping in, Mills saw this as a great opportunity to tour with his Follow-Me 3D SIX remote followspot system and shares his experiences of using Follow-Me from the early days of Follow-Me 2D to the current Follow-Me 3D systems.
Having been Introduced to Follow Me-2D in 2017 on a Europe run with Avenged Sevenfold and Disturbed, Mills immediately saw what an amazing addition this could be to his shows: “Since then I have bought several Follow-Me 2D licenses and early January 2019 our design firm, Touch Light & Media, invested in the new Follow-Me 3D systems. We have rented our systems to several international tours, Shinedown, The Killers, many corporate events, and several high-profile political events.”
The Follow-Me 3D TWO & SIX systems are scalable, allowing remote manual tracking from one performer up to six performers; from 12 fixtures to unlimited fixtures within one modular system. Further to this performer and fixture scalability, Follow-Me 3D SIX systems are extensible: designed to allow the addition of the Follow-Me performer auto tracking module with its range of capabilities and functionality.
On previous shows the band was bothered by the traditional followspots being at lower angles and blinding them. Mills choose to see if Follow-Me 3D could be a good solution to reducing this issue. Each band member has two Robe Spiiders at 45˚ angles from the down stage truss to follow them, they are very happy with the results. This set up with Follow-Me 3D including a total fixture use of 10 Robe Spiiders and 14 Martin Vipers Plus also enables all the fade in/out, color changes and blackouts to be completely in sync, with these parameters controlled via the MA lighting desk. Pan and Tilt of the fixtures remained in the hands of the Follow-Me operators via the FM Mouse Consoles. This set up with Follow-Me allows Mills to get very creative with guitar solos, intros and outros, and accent different band members solos.
The ease and speed with which Follow-Me can be set up and operated on tour has impressed Mills. “The initial setup at the first show took an hour or so, now it usually takes me around 30 minutes to get the camera and fixtures re-calibrated. This is my first time touring with the Follow Me 3D and I decided to handle everything myself so I could get more real time experience with it.” During the pandemic Mills was able to set Follow-Me up in his home office coupled with his visualizers.
Keen to use Follow-Me in a live situation Mills was curious how it would be setting up, calibrating, operating, and putting the system away after the show finished: “It has been great, and I am really impressed with the updates the Follow Me team have made.” Before each show, Mills runs a spot meeting and has the operators sit down and move the targets around on the screen to get used to the way the Follow-Me consoles react. “So far, the operators have really enjoyed using Follow-Me and had positive things to say about the experience… On the KoRn tour the first band do not get spots and often the Follow Me operators will sit in during the first band just to get a little practice following people with the targets. Seems to take about 3-5 minutes for them to get used to the movement.”
Six years on and now using the latest Follow-Me 3D SIX system Mills states: “Follow-Me is my favorite remote tracking system on the market and I am impressed with how far it has progressed since I was first introduced to it in 2017. I look forward to checking out any additional features that may be implemented in the future.”
Further information from Follow-Me: https://follow-me.nu/
