Hard rock/metal band Disturbed are out on tour literally setting the stage on fire. They had a first on the tour when the SFX fire was so hot it set off one venue’s sprinkler system, dousing the band in water! PLSN spoke with the Production/Lighting Designer Scott Holthaus, Lighting Director/Programmer Alex Mungal, and Pyro Programmer/SFX Shooter Joey Herring. We also have a Vendor View from ImageSFX’s Doug Adams on the SFX for this tour.
Scott Holthaus
Production/Lighting Designer
For Scott Holthaus it was a really fun and interesting process working the Disturbed tour. After some discussion with Dennis Brennan from Q Prime Management and the band, Holthaus created a comic book-style storyboard that put the design into understandable scenes. “The one-word feedback from Disturbed singer David Draiman… ‘Sick,’” notes the designer. “The original spark was to blow off the big LED video screen in the center. We knew that in sheds we would still have side screens, so we decided to use those funds and do something fun and different. We landed on a set of writhing, fire breathing motion and scenic steel. The hinged, moving trusses not only provide numerous shapes but also fluid motion… not to mention, are completely jam packed with fire.”
Holthaus says each five-part 60’ truss section has an overlapping fire tube to create a horizon of continuous flames. “Also, each of the three 60’ sections have 10 forward shooting flame projectors to give depth to the fire. When the trusses articulate in fluid motion, the line of flames do as well which is cool.”
Holthaus worked with ‘Pyro Pete’ Cappadocia on Mötley Crüe’s 25th anniversary of Dr Feelgood and realized then they shared a love for scenic abstract pyro… “As opposed to the all too familiar slap and pop of traditional rock pyro designs that predictably hit the cryo on the one. Pete grabbed this by the horns and created new huge looks that made the flames come alive. They wrapped everything in a fire protective cloth and steel-only rigging plus tons of more safety stuff I don’t understand. Fun fact—we use over 1,000 lbs. of propane per show, and as far as I’m led to believe, it blows the doors off most everybody else!”
“I have said for years that someone would come along and do a show without a big LED TV behind them,” says Holthaus. “Who would have thought it would be us. I’m proud to be involved with Disturbed, Dennis Brennan from Q Prime, and Ken Mitchell our Production Manager. I just love all those guys, and I was stoked to work with Alex Mungal, bad ass LD and my new pal. Then I appreciate all the help from my pal Cort Lawrence who sat in my chair for a few days of rehearsals as I was stuck in Europe!”
Alex Mungal
Lighting Director/Programmer
Alex Mungal came on board as the tour LD and Programmer. He hadn’t worked with Holthaus prior to this project, but says he was definitely excited to program on the designer’s rig to bring this show to life knowing Holthaus’ name in the industry. “Directing this show has been exciting at every turn. The band has been adding a new song to the set every day, so they’ve been constantly keeping us on our toes playing songs that they haven’t performed in 10+ years. From the new (old) songs, to changing up some pyro looks, and truss moves on the fly, everything is organized chaos.”
Mungal programmed the show under Holthaus’ supervision. “We would butt heads on little sleep and tell each other ‘No you’re the crazy one,’ but by the end of it, we were saying, ‘We’re both crazy!’ Much of the show is timecoded, but I’ve been punting the new songs as they come, as well as adding new pyro hits, a few free form truss moves, and I-Mag effects to flow with the show,” Mungal adds.
“I’ll say with the sheer amount of fire to play with, the rig as a whole has been a blast adjusting to let the fire be the focus and back off the competition for a bit, but then bring back complimentary looks that just make everyone smile throughout the show. The wow factor of the combinations of all the different parts really allows us to have so much diversity, no repeat looks, havoc and mayhem, and a constant ‘dang that’s a vibe.’ In addition to fire, we’ve got big cryo strikes on the drums that give some really unique mixtures in the various scenes to let every fixture hit you in different ways throughout the performance.”
Mungal says the crew out with him is great. “It’s been a pleasure working with everyone bringing this freak show to life. The band closes with ‘Inside the Fire’ and we certainly are inside the fire by the end. I’m out here with a team pulling off wild things, and if I could describe everyone—including the band—in one word: ‘enablers.’ I’ll walk into the office and say that I want to try something stupid, and almost every time, the response is ‘approved.’ I’m having fun.”
Joey Herring
Pyro Programmer/SFX Shooter
Bringing this show to life has really been such a wild ride, says Pyro Programmer/SFX Shooter Joey Herring. “From playing with the FireSnake system for the first time and wrapping my head around the scale of it all, to riding and taming the dragon every night a few feet away on stage right. The whole thing has been crazy. For everybody involved, it’s taken a moment to acclimate to the sheer scale of this show.”
Image Engineering created a fixture like their FireScreen called the FireSnake featuring a BBQ grill bar and two forward shooting jets. “We’ve strapped 15 of them onto the front of articulated trusses on automated hoists. A few weeks into the tour, we added [TBF-Pyrotec] 5-Master flame projectors that create a flame lattice from the floor controlled by Alex (Mungal). A little after, we added FireScreens to the floor filling in the gaps. The show has grown a lot since debuting in early July, and it’s evolved into something really incredible. Oh yeah, and our piano burns like a dumpster fire.”
Herring says they order 1,200 lbs. of propane per show and use most of it when the venue allows it. “Propane is delivered in liquid form and burns in vapor form; we convert the fuel and pressurize it to feed units in the air and on the floor. We have a hotrod of a fuel delivery system that heats the liquid to speed up the process; that keeps the beast fed during the show. Image Engineering’s gear and the crew on this tour really shine with how hard we work to keep up with the programming and pace of the show while making sure exactly nothing goes wrong, and every piece of the system is checked and accounted for from the time we set up until the last piece is packed up. While Disturbed performs on stage with pyro in the background, [pyro crew] Bryan, Tyler, and Dro have their beautifully choreographed ballet of tank changes, spotting cues, calling out temperatures and pressures, refilling liquid units, and set changes. Everybody helps on this tour, and it would take a novel to mention every individual contribution. From top to bottom, there are so many eyes and hands on this thing.”
Herring remembers calling Holthaus to ask how many songs he wanted to use flames in, and “his response was ‘all of them.’ We have everything from a sexy little bit of flame to raining down hellfire in the show and hitting it all at the same time and holding until it hurts. I think the whole thing has come out really artful and plays out in a way that doesn’t sacrifice the impact you’d normally get from a big pyro hit. The whole show needed a ’safety pass’ in rehearsals where we had to change a lot of the programming to ensure we weren’t going to hurt any gear. I’ve been on tours where the lighting melted more plastic than we’ve melted with heat or flame on this.”
Herring’s company, Enigma Show Control, has a close working relationship with Image Engineering where they contract them to come in and program and occasionally staff tours. “I always jump at the opportunity to do something special as this.”
The whole team at Image Engineering in Baltimore deserves huge credit for this one, says Herring. “It truly takes a village. The SFX engineering team designed, prototyped, and pushed units and the control system through production in six weeks to make this happen. The control system behind it is a leap forward from anything I’ve worked with before. Keep an eye on what comes out of the shop, their capabilities are incredible. The compliance department has and continues to work tirelessly convincing jurisdictions to let us do this show, and they drive this just as much as anybody on site. A huge thanks to everyone in the front office for enabling us to build and grow this show. So much more goes into SFX than setting it up and pressing the button, and this has been an impressive, coordinated effort on a number of fronts.”
Production Team
- Tour Manager: Guy Sykes
- Production Manager: Ken Mitchell
- Production/Lighting Designer: Scott Holthaus
- Lighting Director/Programmer: Alex Mungal
- Automation Ctrl/Prog: Sebastian Richard
- Stage Manager/Playback: Nick Engle
- Lighting Crew Chief: David Zuckerman
- Lighting Techs: Hannah Fabel, Liz Hohman
- Dimmer Tech: Jessica Rushing
- Pyro Crew Chief: Bryan Ratay
- Programmer/SFX Shooter: Joey Herring
- SFX Techs: Pedro Sison, Tyler Scott
- Fabricator: James Whittley
- Set Carpenter: Scott Norvold
- Riggers: Jeremy Caldwell (Lead), Colin Wood
- Lighting Vendor: Premier Global Production, Rep. James Vollhoffer
SFX Team
- Pyro/SFX: ImageSFX
- President, Creative Lead: Doug Adams
- Account Manager: Pete “Pyro Pete” Cappodocia
- Director of Touring Operations: Kelly Kamp
- Assistant Project Manager: Emma Heath
- Asset Deployment Manager: Phil Payne
- Asset Deployment Coordinator: Tyler McKinnon
- Compliance Coordinators: Katherine Thomas, Ariana Pazdersky
- Concept/Design Development: Nicholas Arnold
- Engineering/SFX: Image Engineering
- Senior Project Engineer: Nick Hock
- Electronics and Programming Engineer: Shep Dick
- Mechanical Design Engineer: Vino Gnanamuthu
- Product Manager: Claire Bowman
- Project Manager: Ian Bottiglieri
- Fabricators: Kevin O’Brien, Riley Friedman
- Assembly: Emilie Mochamer, James Radko, Jack Merhar, Eric Mochamer, Jennifer Hallingstad
Gear
Lighting
- 2 MA Lighting grandMA3 full-size
- 4 MA Lighting grandMA NPU
- 2 Resolume Arena 7 Media Server
- 16 Robe BMFL Spot
- 14 Vari-Lite VL6500 Wash
- 30 Ayrton Magic Panel FX
- 8 GLP impression X4 Wash
- 25 CHAUVET COLORado PXL Bar 16
- 16 CHAUVET Color STRIKE M
- 42 TMB Solaris Flare
- 4 High End Systems FQ100 Performance Fog Generator
- 4 hazebase Base Hazer Pro
Pyro
- 1 MA Lighting grandMA3 light console
- 8 60 Gal. Image Engineering Touring Propane Accumulator System
- 3 Propane Vaporizer
- 15 Image Engineering FireSnake
- 1 Image Engineering FireSnake Controller
- 4 TBC-Pyrotec 5 Master Flame Projector
- 6 Image Engineering FireScreen
- 1 Image Engineering Custom Flaming Piano
- 8 Showven Sparkular Fall Machine
- 16 Image Engineering CO2 Jet
Vendor View – ImageSFX
Doug Adams, President, and Creative Lead for ImageSFX talks about the pyro solutions they provided for the Take Back Your Life Tour.
Concept + Engineering = Solution
‘Pyro Pete’ [Cappadocia] introduced us to designer Scott Holthaus. They’ve been talking for some time about this idea with our FireSnake. It was something Scott had had in his mind for some time—a constantly moving truss of flames; every song morphs into something different. Pete came to me, and we went over renderings and went back and forth, until in the end, we have three trusses, the width of the stage, with continuous runs of fire effects.
Nick Hock, our Senior Project Engineer, really put it all together. Once we decide on the vision then we pass it on to our engineering team at Image Engineering. They made this thing happen; it was quite incredible. It’s seamless and that was the beautiful part of it; you don’t see the gap. There are eight-foot long bars, but they overlap, so, when the trusses moved around, it looks like it was all one run. Each FireSnake section has two forward-facing jets, but you can change the nozzle to shoot up and you can change the type of flame that it shoots—puffy, fantails, jets. Cable and hose management was a big challenge on this tour, because the rig moves, but we figured it out. It’s all flaming propane-based and all totally custom. There are no off-the-shelf products used for the fire effects.
To make this work, everything had to be proportional. You must have total control over every aspect of it. For the FireScreens, we put in four valves, and two proportional valves. There were a few other things that we had to do just to bump it up; to make it nice, smooth, and even. But it is all about the movement. They wanted to have the movement, to follow the feel and the vibe of the show. We did the same thing with the piano, which has a moment towards the end of the show.
It took us a good couple of months to produce everything—from design, fabrication, to rehearsing, and touring. When we tested the fire system, we did it all laying down because we didn’t have the height in our shop to rig it. And let me tell you, when you have that many FireScreens laying down in rows, it produces an incredible amount of heat.
Monitoring the Heat
To keep from melting lighting fixtures, we created steel baffles, so it projects the heat away from the lights. Also, the lights are staggered behind the effects and we can direct the heat.
The heat’s going to go up regardless, but we can direct the heat so it doesn’t go out and around the fixtures. We just make sure that we have enough of a gap. We used a lot of Panther Felt, a flame-retardant material, as well, around any of the cabling or anything that’s close. To monitor the heat, we use a FLIR thermal camera and three infrared thermometers. Everything is controlled via a grandMA3 console. In addition to flame effects, we also are supplying smoke effects, low smoke effects, and cryogenics like CryoJet as well. We provided Showven’s Sparkular cold spark fall machines, they act like inverted sparklers to shoot ‘sparks’ down from the truss. In terms of numbers, we use approximately thirty 30 lbs. forklift propane tanks a night, along with twenty four 50 lbs. CO2 bottles, and we run over a half a mile of hosing.
When people ask us for SFX for a project or tour, we say, ‘Don’t limit yourself creatively to what your vision is. Put your ideas down on paper. Chances are we can do it. That’s what we’re all about. We push the limit; coloring outside the lines, doing everything safely, of course. Safety is first and foremost, but we like to push the limits and go as far as we can to make it unique every time.’ The Disturbed tour is a great example of what we do to realize a creative vision.
Learn more about ImageSFX at www.imagesfx.com.
