As part of the release of Andrea Bocelli’s Cinema album, a collection of iconic movie theme songs, he performed a special one-night concert at Los Angeles’ Dolby Theatre. The show was taped for broadcast on PBS. The reaction to the production was so good that Bocelli and his team decided to modify the one-off production into a tourable concert. The Cinema World Tour recently completed its first leg through the U.S., including dates in Phoenix, Las Vegas, New York City, and Washington DC.
A longtime creative collaborator with Bocelli, Steve Cohen was the creative director for the Cinema special and the subsequent tour. Cohen also handled the lighting design and was co-production designer with David Korins. “We’d recently designed Mariah Carey’s show together, and during that process, we developed a terrific working relationship,” says Cohen. “We have a similar view of life and art and were looking for an opportunity to work together again. This just fell in perfectly with our schedules.” For the design, we developed an Italian piazza with the concept of projection mapping on the buildings that created the village square. I believe that it’s quintessentially Italian to be sitting al fresco, listening to music and watching a film — it’s a romantic image that fit for Andrea.”
Korins agrees, and describes the show as “a love letter to cinema, as is the album,” he says. “The idea came very early on in the process, where we could have architecture that really created this beautiful and intimate place. Then, be able to be transformed, the way the songs transform you, into very cinematic sweeping vistas through front projection. We always wanted the buildings to remain present as we found there’s this real, true to life thing that happens where the architecture remains, which created a much more realistic and transforming effect.”
Tuscan Influences
They designed a piazzetta — a small piazza — typical in any Italian country town. “Andrea’s from Tuscany, so we took that as a geographical marking place and designed three-dimensional buildings on two-dimensional flats that were going to be projected on,” Cohen notes. “I really wanted this to have a theatrical forced perspective, something that David does so very well. He developed this beautiful, vanishing perspective where the buildings seemed to slightly tilt, which created a bit of fantasy and made you feel that you were inside the space, not just observing it from the audience.”
To create photorealistic buildings for the set, Korins’ team considered stock photography as the solution initially, but quickly found that the images wouldn’t easily work for their design. “We thought at first we would buy high resolution photographs of buildings and stitch them together,” explains Korins. “But we realized very early on we were actually going to need to control the palette, the angle, the perspective, and get the very high resolution images for scenery that big. We were going to need to actually take our own pictures and stitch them together vertically for the necessary resolution. I sent my associate, Rod Lemmond, who I’ve worked with for almost 17 years, to Italy to shoot the buildings. He spent four days shooting a wide variety of buildings in all kinds of light and from different angles. I had several people in the office downloading these enormously large files,” says Korins. “We had to rent a bank of computers to deal with the large-sized files, then stitch them together, Photoshop them, and tweak them so they all share a similar color palette. It was really exciting and interesting to be able to actually get the real thing.”
Korins credits his team at David Korins Designs for the work that resulted in the beautiful digitally printed scenery. “I have to give credit to my illustrators, Alex Innocenti and Alexander Kuhn, along with Rod Lemmond, my associate, who really was an integral part of laying out the plan, and all the elevations of the buildings,” says the designer. “Also, Javier Ameijeiras was a key member of the team. He’s really an exceptional concept illustrator who I love to work with early on in a process. I would do pencil sketches and he makes them into beautiful magic.”
Projections and Previz
Cohen also enjoyed the process this design afforded, “I had always loved the result of projection mapping three-dimensional buildings, so I thought ‘Why not project on flats that are painted to look like buildings?’ Not really knowing what kind of result we would get. I was lucky to have J.T. Rooney onboard, who has incredible expertise in this discipline and is also in a very familiar with d3 Technologies’ d3 media server platform. It was the first time I’ve ever used the d3, and the results were exactly as advertised. Flexible, reliable, and quick to react and allowed us to manipulate the imagery, merge the projectors correctly in a very compressed schedule. Lightborne (out of Cincinnati), my content collaborators developed the content, created the complex animations, and created a virtual 3D world which allowed us to see the results of the projections on the flats, long before load in. This allowed us to get a true sense of how the surfaces would react and allowed J.T. to build looks in advance, which was invaluable to the whole creative process. Along with projection on the piazza, we created one of the buildings stage center, as the ‘piazza’s movie screen’ where we would highlight the film contents by projecting the actual film clips and stills from the movies themselves.” For the front projections, the production used two Barco 40K and four Barco 30K stacked projectors. VER supplied all of the video projection equipment and the video crew support for the Dolby Theatre PBS special as well as the tour.
Since the production was originally a one-off event that would be taped for broadcast on Public Broadcasting, the budgets weren’t unlimited. The team knew film clip clearances would be too costly, so by producing montages of stills paired with animation, they gave the look and feel that people associate with these iconic films and the songs from them. “We couldn’t use a lot of actual clips from movies like, West Side Story, Doctor Zhivago, The Godfather, etc.,” says Cohen. “They’re prohibitively expensive for a show for PBS, so we had to do a little pastiche. For example, with Doctor Zhivago, instead of paying for footage, we bought stills, created pan and scan animations of them, and then created some original animations to look like winter in Russia, the classic shot of the train in the snow through the Russian country. We did a similar thing with West Side Story. We projected fire escapes on the piazza and transformed it to a New York City skyline. I matched the color palette of the film’s posters and opening credits; since these were such recognizable films, we were able to suspend belief a bit and you felt as if you were in the environment of the films themselves.”
For the building scenery itself, the high-resolution composited photos from Korins’ team were taken to All Access Staging & Productions, who handled all of the scenic construction for the Cinema productions. They had them digitally printed on fabric that was mounted on hard flats with Velcro for the PBS special. “So it’s a two-dimensional, quasi three-dimensional set,” says Cohen. “They’re flats but they did have some perspective and very small offsets to create a bit of depth, but for the most part, the art created the dimensionality.” For the television show, taking these fabric panels and mounting them on hard pieces was a logical thing — we had all day to put it in. When we decided to tour the production, it was going to be a challenge, because these flats were 35 to 40 feet tall, and it would just take too long. So I had All Access do a couple of tests where they took the goods and mounted them on netting — stretched them on a frame in a couple of different ways. At the end of the day, we ended up putting stiffeners in the sides of the fabric and did a straight hang on truss. All Access built frames to attach to the bottom of the goods to prevent hourglassing, however because the goods were so heavy and well-constructed, the crew simply weighted the bottoms and they looked great.”
From Theatres to Arenas
The theatrical design however had to be completely re-scaled for arenas. Cohen explains, “Bocelli sells 270 degrees in arenas, and this show was built for an 180 degree view proscenium presentation. This was an incredible challenge, not only for scale, but in a theatre, you have much less ambient light and distraction from arena bleachers, exit signs, and the like. I was concerned that without absolute darkness, the set flats would look fake; but we were all very pleased that this didn’t occur.”
Korins was pleased with how the move from a traditional proscenium theatre to an arena worked, “That was a big challenge. How do you install this little thing that was intentionally made to be intimate and have black surrounding it? How do you make it really feel like it was meant to be in this big, huge world? It was something we definitely talked about. Part of what we do in the theatre is capitalize on the control of an environment,” explains Korins. “In the arena, we had to give some of that control up. What was interesting about it, though, is because we had been so wonderfully constrained in the theatrical setting, the design translated in the arena as this beautiful little jewel box kind of sitting in this new vast environment. And Steve, I think very smartly, when we got to touring, lit the ceiling, and he was able to incorporate the whole room to kind of stretch the show out and make this little jewel box reach out to the audience. Steve is one of the great masters of being able to create architecture so beautifully with light in space.”
“We had a mostly traditional lighting hang at the Dolby, with five electrics and an audience package,” continues Cohen. “I hung truss that followed the contour of the city,” he notes, with a lighting rig that follows the shape of the actual ground plan of the piazza. “All the trussing was capture truss — lights riding inside — so once the rig is flown, the bottom cord of the truss became the hang points for the soft goods. You rig it, deploy the lights, hang the soft goods, sand bag them, and you’re off to the races.”
A Delicate Balance
Since a large part of the design centered on the front projection on the buildings of the piazza, Cohen and his lighting team needed to avoid overwhelming the more delicate projected imagery. “We had to be careful with levels,” says Cohen. “As powerful as the projectors were, we still had maybe 15 footcandles coming off the flats, so we had to be very surgical in our focus and intensity.” Cohen’s lighting equipment for these shows was one single fixture type. “I had nothing but 120 [Martin MAC] Viper Profiles out there,” comments Cohen. “It was not a cue-intensive show; we built two or three cues per song and a set of conditions that let the projection carry the dynamics. PRG, who’s been the Bocelli vendor for eons had a really good lighting crew and lighting gear for these shows.” Lighting director Felix Peralta programmed the lighting, and J.T. Rooney handled the video programming for the Dolby theatre production and taping. For the tour, the lighting director was a longtime Cohen collaborator, Bryan Barancik; Simón Anaya handled the projection programming.
The result of the collaboration between Korins and Cohen certainly transported the audience, and there is no doubt that was by design. “I think that [the use of] projection mapping is an exciting creative tool in the designer’s arsenal,” notes Cohen. “The software now allows us so much flexibility to be able to lay images on top of images and really create an environment. We were able to create a sense of place and then fill that place with emotions. We wanted to create an evening at the opera, in an Italian Piazza, with one of the most remarkable voices of all time. That was the theme we held close to that with whatever creative choices we made visually.” Audiences across America who got to spend an evening in Italy certainly agree they accomplished their goal.
For more Andrea Bocelli Cinema tour photos by Todd Kaplan, go to http://www.prolightingspace.com/photo/albums/andrea-bocelli-gallery-shot-by-todd-kaplan.
