Hey, it’s New Year’s in Rio. No worries.
Last month I got a call from my friend, Alex Skowron, the LD for the Black Eyed Peas. The band had booked themselves on a beach in Rio for New Year’s Eve, but they had another gig on the 29th in Las Vegas. He couldn’t make it to Brazil until the show, so I covered for him. Dave Hill had designed a replica stage and lighting rig for Rio and five other cities around the globe. I was to clone Alex’s show to Dave’s rig for a show that would be broadcast worldwide. I kept a running diary of observations, and you’re in luck because I’d like to share them with you.
When I arrived on the 28th, things were going typically for a show in Brazil — backwards! There was a giant ribbon-like set piece running everywhere on the stage. No matter what needed to be done, this ribbon was in the way. I’m sure it will look fabulous. I even got to meet the lighting consultant sent by the Nokia clients to insure that their ribbon was lit correctly.
Once the truss was up in the air, they hoisted the fixtures up to it individually and attached them. I refused to ask why. This didn’t seem to bother the crew, despite the fact that the gig was on the beach and we were near the equator.
They proceeded to place the ribbon squarely in front of the truss spots, which made them nicely decorative but of little use for lighting. So we had to move them. Of course, this ribbon was rigid, and it was lashed to the roof with rope and gaff tape, preventing the crew from lowering the truss to move them. I wondered if the truss could support three guys and a spotlight standing within a five-foot section.
The upstage video wall was 15 feet off the ground, sitting on scaffolding. This would not have been an issue if the upstage truss wasn’t cutting the top half of the LED wall out of the picture. They brought in the cavalry, reattached all of the manually-operated chain hoists and lowered the video wall to two meters off the deck. I was disappointed because I kind of wanted to watch a video wall that only shows the performers from the waist down.
The downstage LED wall that flies directly above the front truss was getting rigged to fly now. Unfortunately, they had already flown the front truss, which was in the way of it all. Out came the ropes and donkeys.
I had placed a few of the LED strips that light the lovely ribbon on pipes jutting out from the edge of the downstage floor. Otherwise half of the big set ribbon would not have been lit. That may well be the case in the end, I thought, but I was trying to accommodate Nokia the best I could. It’s funny how none of the renderings showed this fabulous ribbon jutting out past the downstage truss.
The grandMA console arrived as expected. Unfortunately, nobody could find the proper fixture profiles and modes to patch them in. I could have found them on the Internet, but there is no wireless. How can a console not have a profile for a Martin MAC 600? I was not concerned. A grandMA expert was flying in from Argentina, and he knew my friend Demfis Fyssicopulos. They just didn’t know when during the week he would arrive, as he didn’t answer his phone. Being an optimist, I reasoned that it was because he was on a plane heading for the job site. The grandMA guy in Brazil had only ever worked on the grandMA PC program, not the actual console. He was okay. I think everyone should do their first show on a new console in front of half a million people.
The Hog consoles we requested were in Brazil; we just weren’t sure where. We expected to see them tomorrow, I was told. But I couldn’t set up FOH for two more days because they were expecting rain and they didn’t have a tent set up to protect the console. Plus the snake was run the previous night, and it was buried somewhere under the sand. They needed to dig to find the connectors at the end.
When they put the floor down, I saw that it was a bright yellow Marley-type material. It was so bright that I guaranteed the band would hurl if I spun any gobos. It was stapled to the deck, and it would make a great skating floor when the rain came at night.
A guy came and introduced himself to me. He was in charge of personally helping me and guiding me through the backstage WYSIWYG setup. He asked me to come back to his trailer and he would get me all ready to program. I never did locate this guy. But it was alright, because the whole show was already programmed on an ESP setup rented from Upstaging in Chicago.
The front of house towers for the audience lighting had not yet been built. It seems high tide conflicts with their positioning, so we had to wait for the tide to fall so they could place some sticks in the sand for markers. But what was really cool was that when the tide went out, it left a giant pool of water on the beach for all the punters. I’m talking about a 25-foot wide trench. This could be the first gig where somebody could pass out in the crowd and drown.
Day Two
The conventional fixtures are all working. The Internet is up. High End and MA lighting came through with some fixture profiles for lights I’d never heard of. The Hogs arrived, and as soon as I’m patched, we start focusing. I do my best to use the PARs for TV lighting, filling dark holes everywhere and focusing around the lovely gaffed and roped ribbon. I have about 40 LED strip lights to illuminate it. I fail miserably. In comes the ribbon lighting consultant. He deftly has the crew move LEDs to different locations and they are all over it. In an hour it looks amazing, and the ribbon lighting consultant disappears forever.
Day Three
I’ve got about 80% of the 200 moving lights working — a fabulous ratio by Brazil standards — and I am thrilled. I move lights with broken color flags to the floor. They are eye candy for the camera shots, and correct color is not important — is it? They are all soaked now. They painted over the yellow floor, so I am downstage center, stuck like a fly on fly paper to the tacky stage, trying to focus the broken and not-broken lights. The towers are up, and I may have control of the 200 audience PARs and 40 Giotto Spots by midnight. They are hoisting the spotlights up to the towers with rope, slamming into the scaffolding as they go. I’m confident the bulbs are already in them.
The lighting company owner comes up and hands me a joint, all the while apologizing profusely in Portuguese. A translator tells me that these are the best spots he could find in Rio. I go over to take a look. Oh…my…God. They are Ultra Arc long throws, complete with a 400-watt HTI bulb. I am doomed. These were not good truss spots in the ‘80s. Now I have six of them for four roaming singers. It will be a fun night with the TV crew.
I hook up the Hogs at FOH and MIDI them together. They don’t talk to each other. Great! The MIDI chips in the console from London are blown. That’s okay. Alex and I will each take a console. I turn on the house fixtures. They are all hung any which way. I will have a great time focusing lights in the rain…on towers…300 feet away. I ask for a walkietalkie and a helicopter camera shot. Nobody is laughing with me. It’s 6 a.m., and the crew is focusing PARs for a mile.
Showtime
Thirty minutes to go, 100 yards to the front of house… In 30 years in the business, I have never felt frightened in a crowd — until now. The grandMA dudes do a fabulous job with the opening acts. We swap the DMX over to the other consoles at midnight, and we are off and running. The four rappers are working the downstage edge of the stage. They are getting blasted by the LEDs we placed in front of the stage to light the ribbons. Ouch! I never saw that coming, probably because I never had a live feed to my TV monitor until show time. But then, the spots are throwing about 35 footcandles on the stage so any light helps us — even if it’s red.
All in all, it was a great gig. The lasers, pyro and confetti all worked. And as usual, I never worried one bit. They have a way of getting it all together in the long run down here, as they did tonight. Here’s to a Happy New Year.
The calm, cool, collected author can be reached at nschoenfeld@plsn.com.
