Long before there were software packages, Patrick Woodroffe kept it real for pre-viz
Long before WYSIWYG, VectorWorks, 3D Studio Max and ESP Vision, there was Patrick Woodroffe’s 4-to-1 real- life studio, albeit in miniature. Woodroffe, who gained notoriety in the industry chiefly as the lighting designer for the Rolling Stones, but whose résumé bulges with superstars and shows dating back to 1972, put together a working scale model studio for preproduction using PAR 16s and miniature truss. The London-based precursor to virtual reality preproduction software was very successful when he sold it to a production company. We spoke to Woodroffe about his venture and how it came about.
PLSN: You built scale models of your designs before previsualization software existed.
Patrick Woodroffe: I did. It was around 1990, the time of AC/DC’s Thunderstruck Tour. It was called 4-to-1, in that the scale was 1:4, in effect. This was before the days of previsualization, of course. I had always thought how great it would be to have a miniature version of what you were going to put out on tour, because you would have a really good sense of what it looked like. You could fix a lot of technical problems, and you could also actually create the cues. It was always sort of a vague idea until one day when I saw the Birdie — the little MR-16 Birdie lights. This was when I was still using PAR cans, and I thought that was it. LSD, at the time, made six-lamp bars of these things with little multiconnectors. I started to take the thing seriously and I got little minibeam Trilite trussing, which was again about _ scale, and I found some little profile lights. I set it all up in a railway arch in England, which is this sort of utilitarian industrial space, and I put in an overhead grid using rebar reinforcing steel and a rigging system like a theatre fly system that came to the side of the stage on a series of fly lines.
How did it work?
If you wanted to hang a truss, you’d clip a couple of carabiners into this overhead bit on cords, you’d clip on the truss, fire them off to the side, you’d load the truss up with little birdie lamp bars and profiles and you’d haul them up in the air. Then you’d have a look at the trim — and we had this stick that was to scale — and if the trim was 20 feet you’d say, ‘Hmm, I think it should be higher. What do you think?’ And then we’d pull it up to 24 feet, and that would be it. We’d move the trusses up a bit, or back a bit, and do all the things that would be very difficult to do in real life. And then, from that point, you’d make up your rigging plot and send it off. We’d get the lighting companies to come down and have a look, the crew chiefs would have a look and say, “If we did it like this, this would be good like this,” et cetera, et cetera.
We’d get all that technical stuff done, and then, on the stage, we built the stage set with little models. We had little art mannequins with little drum kits and keyboards; it was great. Then, out front, we had a Vari*Lite board, and we had an Avolite board. It was sort of like a spaceship console, rather, like a recording studio with a sound system, video cameras, comfy chairs and sofa. It had all that stuff and off we went. It worked. We held our head above water for two to three years. Obviously, with the advent of the moving light, it became difficult. What we did in the end was we said, “This profile represents a moving light and in this number they are all going to be red.” So, someone would run up and put red gels in. We had little color changer — LSD made little mini color changers with hand scrollers as well.
Pat Harkes, who worked for a band called Status Quo, and Nick Sholem, with the Eagles and Sting, used it a lot, and I used it for all of my shows, of course. We would rent it out by the day, and the bands would come down, too. We had all sorts of people down there — the Bee Gees, AC/DC, Simply Red — and, remember, it was in this funny little garage with a great sound system with a couple of big full-range speakers. We’d say, “This is what your show is going to look like.” They were amazed. For the Freddie Mercury Tribute in London, Queen came down, and more to the point, David Mallet, the director, came down with all his cameramen. We had this little camera with a television monitor and he would look at it and say, “Rocket, I need you here. This is a great shot here. We need to build a platform here. We need a longer lens on camera five.”
I can tell you it really worked. One of the reasons we ended up folding, in the end, was that I was pretty busy doing all the shows that I do. I was advocating using this system, but by advocating it, I was adding another week of preprogramming to every job I did. It was sort of counterproductive for me, when I was trying to fit in all this different sort of work: opera, ballet, televisions shows, rock shows. It became quite complicated to do that, and, what was in effect, previsualization.
So we sold it to a guy called Wilfried Schiefer from Showtec. They took it to Germany, and I think they still use it to this day. They did it a really proper commercial operation, employed three full-time people and had a really big space. They’d do operas down there, and they used to do big industrials and build beautiful scaled-model sets. Their clients would come down and show their people, so it was pretty interesting. Funnily enough, just at the time when pre-vis was coming out, I went and looked at a few systems and I thought about doing a just-electronic version of this. I think people have done it.
Of course, people do stuff on WYSIWYG, but I was never really happy with it. Certainly, not when I first looked at it because it was wire-frame, and because a wash light looked like a profile and a profile looked like a PC beam light, so it was rather pointless. Now, from what I understand, it’s pretty good, and you can even render in real-time or very close to real-time.
I think somebody should, if they haven’t already, do a version like we did, with a really beautiful programming suite. I think someone in England has one. It should have multiple big-screen screens so you can see different angles, with the board you are going to take out, and comfy chairs and a sound system. I think that would be really good. Of course, I guess we can do that at home now with computers [laughs].
Aside from the time constraints, I think there are advantages to the way you did it.
I think the way people do it in their bedrooms in fine, but it’s quite a singular exercise. It’s a private exercise, or a lighting designer will do it with his programmer. But the times when it was the most useful, when I think about it now, were not so much taking a disc out of the board and going to the first show, sticking the disc in and having a show. Although that did happen, to a degree, it was much more trying to illustrate everything to the groups of people who were required to know it: the crew, the programmers, the artists, the management and the television directors. To have them in the room and show them what is was going to be happening made a huge difference. Everyone knew what it was going to look like, and there was a huge sense of confidence.
What I find, sometimes, is that these computer visualizations tend to look more beautiful than the real thing. It’s quite easy to force a perspective and to not show half the crap you need, like the trusses and this and that. Our thing was pretty real. Everything you saw, you got — with cable runs and cable picks, which you can’t pretend don’t exist.
Fast-forward to today, in comparison -— How did you handle the preparation for the Police tour?
For the Police tour, we did exactly that, but we did it in real scale. We went to Upstaging and basically set the whole rig up and built a mockup of the stage. The stage was still being built at Tate so we roughed it up, and the people at Upstaging did it really neatly. Danny Nolan and I sat there for a week — we had a set list — and programmed the show pretty much cue-to-cue, because we only had a couple of days rehearsal with the band. The band wasn’t as involved in the lighting as some other bands. So, it meant that when Danny Nolan got to Vancouver, he had a whole show that he was comfortable and confident with. And, then, of course, he finessed it, changed it and bettered it. It was very close to the real thing, so, in a funny way, that was a real-time, real-scale previsualization.
How often does that happen?
Very rarely.
