Travis Shirley shares design insights on the P FKN R production
Latin superstar/reggaeton artist Benito Antonio Martinez Ocasio, known as Bad Bunny, recently put on a big appreciation party to pay tribute to his homeland of Puerto Rico. The two-night event Dec. 10-11, 2021 filled San Juan’s Estadio Hiram Bithorn baseball stadium with 50,000 fans. The equipment to put on the production filled 70 sea containers and required a lot of labor working around the clock to pull it off.
“It wasn’t just big, it was insanely big,” says Travis Shirley, the show’s production and lighting designer. “It was a four-week load-in for a two-night show and was [declared] the largest in Puerto Rico history. They said they wanted it to be the Super Bowl of Puerto Rico and that is exactly what it was in terms of size and scope.”
Although Bad Bunny’s team has its own production crew for their touring schedule, this one was unlike anything ever preceding it. Production Director Roly Garbalosa approached Shirley to ask him if he’d be interested. The artist envisioned a festival design but in a baseball stadium setting. Shirley, whose design resume includes several years of the Electric Forest Festival, tapped into his creative database to fit the production challenges.
Translating “Over The Top”
“I do a lot of big tours and shows, and I’ve never seen these numbers: $10 million (was put into it). It was about a homecoming show, his first show in two years. It was for Puerto Rico, and he made sure ticket prices were under $50,” Shirley noted. “They said, ‘We want this thing to be over the top big,’ so, I ran with that. Anytime someone says, ‘over the top,’ I didn’t want to design something that was unachievable. Obviously, I had some crazy wild ideas but wanted to be realistic. I didn’t want to spend millions of dollars to fabricate something for two shows. Let’s avoid custom fabrication, I said. If this was a tour, we could amortize it but for two shows… so I started with the physical structure of the stage.”
Shirley flew down to Puerto Rico with lighting vendor Robert Roth of Christie Lites, and the team spent two days gathering measurements of the stadium. “I got a footprint of what I wanted the stage size to be. That was the initial step. Then it blossomed and bloomed.” Instead of bringing in a traditional roofed stage, Shirley wanted an element that wasn’t so cookie cutter. He explains, “We built our own open stage. We used every piece of scaffolding on the island. The scaffolding gave me the structure or backbone to hang production. From there, that showed me where I could put lighting and video screens. It was an architectural work, not just about lights and video. I had to be careful and intentional of weight loads and where we were placing things. Scaffolding was crazy. The scaffolding started a month before the production load-in,” he adds.
“Not many shows are built without a roof to hang from, but that was the objective. We wanted to build the show with no roof, so rigging became detailed and intricate. Five Points Rigging did all the rigging, a very important job on this with all the cranes and scaffolding.”
Along with the massive production, the artist wanted a huge video presence. “That is where I started designing. The physical stage itself was about 110’ wide. The full spectrum with the LED video screens was 500’ wide. It’s easy for an artist to get lost in that size alone, so I worked closely with Sturdy, a Los Angeles-based content creation company, and they built some beautiful, very bright, colorful, eccentric 3D worlds and custom animated clips. It was more like an animation film process than content. They are amazing.” Shirley’s video vendor of choice was Screenworks. “They wrapped up EDC Orlando a few weeks prior to it, so thankfully we were able to repurpose their gear in terms of video products,” he notes.
“Because we had the artist on a 500’ stage, the I-Mag was not only done for artistic reasons, but also to showcase the artist as it was quite easy to get lost with a footprint that size,” Shirley explains. “The main video elements were made up of large screens flanking the stage, right and left where they eventually emerge into LED strips. On the main stage there were two large video monoliths that played a significant role in displaying I-Mag. With the monoliths being over 50’ in size and three dimensional, they created a larger than life of the artist himself. Along with traditional I-Mag, the Sturdy team created custom Notch effects that helped break up the monotony of standard I-Mag. Upstage of the three-dimensional monoliths there were additional LED strips tying the whole production together. The custom content really turned the entire stage and performance area into an LED playground.”
Scaffolding was being built three to four weeks before production loaded in, requiring 24-hour load-in days with 20 lighting and 20 video crew working morning and evening shifts. “It was a huge thing,” Shirley emphasizes, noting the 70 sea containers filled with gear, “between lighting, video and staging.”
Lighting Live and For Video
“Every fixture had an intentional use,” comments Shirley. “It was all thought out about what each fixture would do and why. We metered all the lights; we did a lot of lamp-swaps for color temperature. It was full on—as much as it was a show for 50,000, it was also a DVD shoot as well.” (The shows were also livestreamed to big screens set up at San Juan’s Coliseo de Puerto Rico José Miguel Agrelot).
Shirley used the 250-plus Robe BMFLs as the workhorse of the show, in a custom way, he says. “When I went to the site survey, I noticed that behind the stage, there were pre-existing stadium lights. There were 160’ towers with arc lamps used for baseball at night. Those were so structurally impactful to the big picture. I had to figure out how to use those,” he explains. So, the team brought in construction cranes and Shirley copied the look of the baseball lights by covering each tower with truss to attach Chroma-Q Color Force 72s on the legs of the towers and three rows of BMFLs horizontally and vertically.
For the 16-camera shoot, lighting the audience was important. Shirley selected the new Martin MAC Ultra Wash fixtures for that role. “They were bright. They punched through video and had incredible zoom. I fell in love with it. We had 50 or 60 of those flanking the stage, on top of the video displays. We rode that video pretty bright, and these Ultras punched through.”
The big challenge was there was no time code in the show, Shirley adds. “Not that every show needs to be time coded, but with a show of this size and with intricate programming, we had to structure how we programmed a little differently. Bad Bunny’s team have never time coded a show, and I tried to talk them into it because you only have so many fingers. But they didn’t want us to do it. The music is so diverse and electronic, I didn’t want to let the lack of time code stifle my creativity. So, the programmers and I were strategic in how we laid out the consoles—we had four [MA Lighting grandMA] MA3s out there—and programmed the show. It was an active show in terms of button presses and flash buttons. That was the only way we were able to achieve the wow factor.”
Trucking in the Show Stopper
The homecoming shows not only showed appreciation to the people of Puerto Rico, but it also primed the fans for the artist’s upcoming North American arena tour, El Último Tour del Mundo (The Last Tour of the World), which was set to kick off in Denver on Feb. 9, 2022. The artist’s custom semi-truck, which plays a big part in his branding, displayed logos advertising this new tour. Shirley incorporated it into the production as a big showstopper for the finale. For its surprise emergence into the last five or six songs in the show, Shirley designed the center stage to lift 16’ up, allowing the truck to drive through it, towing a shipping container onto the field. Bad Bunny, followed by special guests, emerged from the container to perform on top of its roof, to the delight of the crowds.
“We cut three elevators into the shipping container, which we converted into a dressing room, so that the artist and special guests could pop out and emerge on top of the shipping container,” Shirley explains. “It was tricky to get the whole center part of the stage to lift 16’ up. The truck had to drive perfectly straight. There were maybe three inches of space left on each side of the truck, or it would have hit the stage. We did several dress rehearsals of it to get it right. We put lights on the container—a bunch of [Martn MAC] Axioms, and [Chroma-Q] Color Force 1s for the uplighting, along with local pyro.”
Considering the amount of gear needed, and the labor shortage, and counting the lighting and video crew working the gig as well, Shirley says, “I’m proud that we were able to put so many people to work at this time of year. If this was done in any different time frame, the design would have had to change due to personnel and available gear. The blessing was that all of this happened in December, when people were wrapping up their year.”
Bad Bunny
P FKN R Concerts
Dec. 10-11, 2021, Estadio Hiram Bithorn, San Juan, Puerto Rico
Crew
- Production/Lighting Designer: Travis Shirley
- Senior Project Manager: Bobby Braccia
- Production Director: Roly Garbalosa
Vendors
- Lighting: Christie Lites
- Video: Screenworks
- Staging: Mountain Productions
- Rigging: Five Points Production Services
- Content Creation: Sturdy
- Barricades: Guardian Barrier Services
- Power: Aggreko
Gear
Lighting:
- 146 Robe BMFL WashBeam
- 317 Martin MAC Axiom Hybrid
- 90 GLP JDC1 Hybrid Strobe
- 60 Martin MAC Ultra Wash
- 195 GLP impression X4 Bar 20s (built as pods of four)
- 225 Chroma-Q Color Force II 72
- 18 Chroma-Q Color Force II 12
- 58 SGM Q-2
- 36 SGM Q-7
- 36 ETC Source Four PARs
- 8 Elation DTW 350 IP
- 12 Altman Q-Lite
- 6 Lycian 1295 3kW Xenon Followspot
- 5 MA Lighting grandMA2 full-size Console
- 4 MDG MAX 5000 APS
- 6 MDG Atmosphere Hazer
- 12 Reel EFX Diffusion Hazer DF-50
- 12 JEM ZR-44 Hi-Mass Fogger
- 30 Fans, miscellaneous sizes
- 72 Christie Lites Type F 8’ Truss Sections
- 350 Christie Lites Type B Truss Sections
- 12 Christie Lites Double Dance Tower Sections
Video:
- 1,136 ROE Carbon-CB5 (5.7mm)LED panels
- 660 sqm of Screenworks 6mm LED panels
- 2,544 Screenworks 12mm LED panels
- 4 disguise GX2cs Media Servers
- NovaStar H15 Video Splicing Processors
