Spiritbox is a Canadian heavy metal band from Victoria, BC formed by husband and wife duo, guitarist Mike Stringer and vocalist Courtney LaPlante. The band recently finished their first headline tour of North America, The Eternal Blue Tour. Working closely with Courtney LaPlante, Lenny Sasso and Drew Mercadante were co-Creative Directors, with Sasso also handling lighting design and Mercadante doing screens producing. Sasso and Mercadante filled us in on how the visuals came together for the well-received tour.
Lenny Sasso
Co-Creative Director, Lighting Designer, SONUS Productions
In His Own Words: The Overview
I’ve been designing for Spiritbox, I would say probably their last three tours, where they’ve been in a supporting role, so it’s just been smaller little ground packages that we’ve been doing for them. Mostly all just plug and play timecode stuff. This was their first ever headlining tour so they wanted to go big. So yeah, we tried to hit a serious grand slam on this one. And seems like it’s really landing well with everybody.
Courtney and I really discussed how we wanted to take a departure away from looking like a very stereotypical metal show; you know with a ton of beams, or a ton of strobe constantly. I tried my best to stick to more of a monochromatic and a two-tone feel per song. So overall, the rig, the design and the creative direction was definitely more in just a more pop show-oriented feel. And then with the video side I went with the curved video wall, like what I have seen them do with The Mandalorian, where they built this curved wall, an LED volume. I hadn’t really seen many bands doing a curved video wall in the club world, which is where Spiritbox is currently touring in. So, I was like, “What if we did this vibe, a more immersive element to where it’s not a flat wall, it curves and it surrounds the band a little bit when they’re on this riser platform that we designed.” It was really a new thing that we decided to try and go and do. And then it was, “All right, what else can we add?” So at the top of the show we wanted a holographic kabuki element to it, which we had seen bands like Purity Ring and alt-J doing. We wanted to figure out how we manipulate this idea and make it our own thing, so we went to Rose Brand and we got the Nebula Net fabric from them, that Darknet fabric they offer. For the first three songs it’s just very minimal side lighting on the band behind the fabric and we’re just doing weird holographic smoke, and lines and stuff. Then we do a big transition that’s like, we pump a ton of fog on stage and a big kabuki drop and the net falls, and then all of a sudden it’s like “Boom” LED wall. So we don’t even introduce the LED wall until the fourth song.
We just wanted to build the show in stages like that. So it’s kabuki net, then it’s the curved LED wall, and then it’s three songs later we have the guitar cabinets on stage, and we roll the guitar cabinets off-stage to reveal more LED wall in front of the riser decking. There’s like a mid-stage LED wall, so we do layering like that. And then for the final three songs of the set, we bring the projector back in. For example, the song ‘Constance’, a lot of the video content is rain, and we’re projecting rain onto the band while there’s rain on the video wall. I really love that look, it’s so beautiful how you have the rain happening on the wall, you have the rain coming down on the band. It’s just so immersive and encompassing of everything that’s going on. So visually, it’s very beautiful. Yeah, so overall design-wise, every three or four songs we are doing something different, adding or changing another element, taking another step up during the whole show, it’s really wild.
On Layering Video and Lighting Together
I’ve known Drew for several years now, and with his company SUPERVOID, he’s become my go-to video guy. He really crushed it on this one. We put our heads together at the start and were like, “This is how we want this song planned, this is how we want this song planned. We want the color palette of this song to be this. I’ll have the lights do this, mirroring what you’re doing with your content.” And so, it was very well thought out every single step of the way, every single song, as to how we wanted it. We really collaborated on everything to have a single concise vision on the whole thing.
On Gear to Support the Design
I have side loaded GT truss, that’s all full of [Ayrton] Mistrals. Then I scattered [GLP] JDC1s all behind the decking and then put JDC1s also side loaded, I mean, that’s like the industry standard now for strobes. Then, I have the Robe Tetra 2s are all along the downstage edge, which has become my favorite fixture. It’s pretty much ended up in almost all of my designs now. I can’t say enough about it. It’s such a beautiful looking fixture. It’s tight. It’s wide. You’ve got the flower effect in there. The colors are amazing. I try to work it into every design I do at this point. So, fixture wise, that’s all we have in the rig really. And then we have the Blizzard wall, which SONUS has invested in and works great. The Blizzard IRiS GT3 panel. It allowed us to do the curve I wanted. This was my first time attempting that curve and it looked really, really cool. We are using the 3.9mm, which is really, as the band likes to say, cinematic. It really pulls you in.
Closing Thoughts
It is so great to see Spiritbox just snowballing pretty hard right now. This tour was a big thing for them and it definitely was a very big collaboration between the band, and me, and Drew for sure. I think that really shows in the production. Everybody was on the same page and we spent a lot of creative meetings just making sure that it was very well thought out. Everybody was very receptive of each others ideas and thoughts and we all come together working on this really great thing. I couldn’t be more proud of this one, man. It’s just every step of the way, every little vision that we had for it, we smashed it.
Drew Mercadante
Co-Creative Director, Screens Producer, SUPERVOID.tv
In His Own Words: The Overview
This was a big tour for them and everyone wanted to pull out all the stops. Lenny designed it with a video wall, and then that’s how I got involved. I was the screens producer for everything. Between me, Lenny, and Courtney, we all more or less handled the creative direction. It was one of those good situations where everybody was really excited about the tour, everybody had a lot of ideas, and everybody just let it all flow.
Lenny has worked as production designer with the band previously for festivals and one-offs. With this being the band’s first headline tour, he and the band had a lot of ambitious ideas to create a multi-layered visual space that would shift and evolve over the course of the set. SUPERVOID was chosen to create all the content and provide co-creative direction in order to tie the lighting and video together. The set starts completely in the dark, while a front projection particle effect slowly forms into the band’s logo. Suddenly as the drums come in, lights turn on to reveal the band behind a kabuki. They perform behind the kabuki for the first three songs until the drums hit on the fourth song where the kabuki drops and the video wall turns on, eliminating the barrier between the band and their fans. We use the projector again later in the set to project TV static, rain, and other imagery directly on to the band.
On Content Design
It was called The Eternal Blue Tour, which was a reference to their album, and a lot of the color was blue in the tour, so we were working with a fairly restricted palette, although we did change that for some songs. They basically wanted to do the color palette that was on the album. For the songs from the first album, it was all black and white. For the song ‘Rule of Nines’, it was all red, because that’s how that music video was. So, it was a pretty restricted color palette and also the mood of it was, as the record’s called Eternal Blue, it is about depression and introspection, and the visuals kind of complemented that.
So the colors stayed the same a lot through the songs, but everything else was pretty varied. There’s some songs where it’s very kind of motion graphics-y, kind of 2D heavy noise. Then there’s other songs where it’s fully 3D scenes, and all sorts of different stuff going on. I think that was the way that we were able to maintain it looking interesting.
We did a lot of environment design and stuff that really made it feel like they were playing with the whole set extension thing. We used a mix of stuff, some of it was just more traditional 3D animation, and some of it we use Unreal Engine, so there’s these hallways and landscapes that’s going on behind them. Other stuff we used Notch, which is realtime particle kind of stuff. I think the realtime tools really gives you a lot of flexibility, and especially Unreal, but definitely Notch as well. For the opening scene it’s just all these particles form to the band’s logo. We wanted to make it look really cool and really ethereal and interesting. In practice, that means doing a lot of different variations of particle looks, because it was realtime, we could be like, “Okay, well, this looks cool, but let’s dial down the turbulence a little bit, and let’s add in more of a fluid feel so it looks a little bit more like water.” Back in the Cinema 4D days, we would’ve been like, “Cool. We’ll run through that overnight, and hopefully it works.” Now, we were all just sitting in the office looking at it, and we’re just like, “All right, try this. Yeah, let’s try that, try that.” We’re driving the video off of a SUPERVOID Media Server, which we build in-house and rent out. It’s a really powerful laptop that then is housed in a two-unit fly rack, which has all sorts of internal components.
On Layering Video and Lighting Together
Lenny and I work together a lot, we’re both based out of Philadelphia. I used to work with Sonos all the time as a freelancer. So, we have a really good relationship. Early on, he showed me the design he was working on, which had the kabuki, and it was pretty close to what the final design ended up being. I was like, “This is really cool. I would love to do content for this, even if it’s for one or two songs or whatever.” I gave him some stuff to show them, and said, “Put my name in the ring.” They initially brought me on, I was going to do about half the songs, but eventually, we just did the whole tour. From the first Zoom call we did with everybody, it was just a very supportive environment. It was a very, very open and rewarding environment to work in. I think that’s why it ended up coming out so special. I wish they could all be like that.
On Gear to Support the Design
Lenny did all the production design, it’s Blizzard Iris panels, which have a 3.9mm pixel pitch. Having that level of density allowed us to really get cinematic looks, which was great. Then he chose the Darknet fabric as the kabuki screen, which came out looking awesome. It was on back order and we didn’t even end up seeing it in person until we got to rehearsals. It just looked great. It takes projection really well. I’ve always loved shows where there’s a screen in front of the band. It’s certainly been done before, but it’s definitely not something you see often, especially with shows of this size. As soon as Lenny showed it to me, I was like, “Oh man, I need to do some of the content for this. I’m dying to do something with the kabuki.”
It’s just the projector for the first three songs with the kabuki. When the kabuki drops that’s a really cool moment. Lenny has a line of Tetra bars on the downstage end of the stage and the kabuki falls just upstage of that by a matter of inches. The Tetras are not in use for the first three songs. It’s all very minimal lighting for the first three songs, because that way we can really let the projector sing, especially as with the budget we’re only using a 14K projector. So any way, when Lenny brings in the Tetras for the first time it totally lights up the Darknet in this way where if you hit it at the right angle, it just becomes a wall of light and you can’t see anything behind it. Then we hit it with an upstage fogger as well, which looked really cool. There’s just smoke seeping out of the screen. Basically the song comes in very fast, the band has a click track in their ears to count them in so they all come in at once and right when that happens, the scrim drops, the video wall comes in super bright, and just beams and craziness with all the lights and everything. It’s a video wall show pretty much from then on, except in the last few songs, there’s bits where we use the projector as a front light on the band.
Closing Thoughts
I think just the best way to describe it is, no we’re not doing anything people haven’t seen before, but it’s like when you get a really good cheeseburger, everybody knows what a cheeseburger is, but when you make it just right, it’s just perfect, and you can’t really ask for something better. I think for us, that’s kind of what it is. Kabuki’s been done before. Video walls have been done to death, but I think we just had the right environment going on between the band, and the ideas flowed really freely, and everybody really respected each other’s opinions; there was no idea that was off the table. It was just really positive and because of that, we made something that we all just put our heart and soul into it and it turned out to be something we’re all really proud of. We were able to pull together with a limited team and limited resources, and made something really cool, purely just out of working hard on it.
Production Team
- Tour Manager/Production Manager/FOH: Parker Mullinix
- Creative Directors: Lenny Sasso, Drew Mercadante, Courtney LaPlante
- Lighting Designer: Lenny Sasso
- Lighting Director: Colton Sellers
- Lighting Vendor: SONUS Productions
- Video Producer: SUPERVOID.tv
- Screens Producer: Drew Mercadante
- Animators: Drew Mercadante, Matt Keppler, Grant Bouvier, Ciara Hegli, Jaxon Graham
- Media Server Operator: Aly Vandenberg
Gear
- 1 MA Lighting grandMA3 light
- 1 SUPERVOID SVX-1 Media Server
- 8 GLP JDC1 Hybrid Strobe
- 8 Ayrton Mistral
- 9 Robe Tetra2
- 54 Blizzard IRiS Icon 3.9mm XL Video Panel
- 1 Barco RLM-W14 Projector
- 1 Darknet Kabuki Fabric
