After tweaking lighting cues for 3 straight days. I’m done. And I’m toast. At this point I think the Fall Out Boy tour will look pretty good. At least until I see the lights set up with the giant TV’s behind them.
Alex and I spec’d 4 – 9’wide by 16’ tall Barco D7 walls. They move up/down and sideways in a variety of configurations. At times they will trolley next to each other and make a pretty big wall. And it will be bright.
Way ****ing bright.
So until we actually see the lights playing with the video, we won’t be sure if we did a really good job. But I’m pretty confident. We’ve been down this road a few times before. I know better than to try and compete with video screens for brightness.
The secret is to place the lights where the video elements aren’t. Since Alex designed the entire show’s video and lighting placement this is easy.
We have a few big pods of lights upstage. These track up and down to fill whatever holes we have when the video walls move. If the walls separate into 4 evenly spaced portraits, the pods will lower down and hang in between them.
On top of these we have giant walls of side lighting. These fixtures will never conflict with the video and the audience will always be able to see shafts of light to accent the rocking music.
We do have more lights over the top of the stage, but they consist of 20 or so movers that we use as key lights or for audience fly outs. One will rarely see their beams when the video is playing. But there are 170 color blasts mounted inside trusses that perform a variety of chases. These will make a statement when turned on, whether the video is rolling or not.
