Black Sabbath has widely been referred to as the band that started heavy metal music when the band formed in Birmingham, England back in 1968. There have been several incarnations of the band since then, leading up to their farewell tour this year with three out of the four original members. Guitarist Tommy Iommi has been the one consistent player in the band during their career and has joined forces again with singer Ozzy Osbourne and bassist Geezer Butler for 2016’s “The End” tour.
Once again, the team from Woodroffe-Bassett Design has been called upon to design the lighting and offer creative direction for the tour, which started on January 20th and is scheduled to run through September. Patrick Woodroffe has designed shows for them in the past, including the last Sabbath tour in 2013. Here’s what he had to say about this year’s tour.
“There’s something quite poignant about watching a band perform a proper farewell tour, a genuine ‘goodbye’ to all their fans, and for me this was very much the case with Black Sabbath. The sense of affection from the audience at the opening show in Omaha was palpable. Having said that, this is a modern show, something that Sharon Osbourne was really keen to show the public on this last go around. The band may have been going for years — indeed, it could be said that they started heavy metal and hard rock — but she wanted them to appear contemporary in some way. So out went the crucifixes and the devil heads and in their place was something much cleaner and technologically up-to-date. It’s a funny mix, but in this case it really worked.”
Michael Keller, who has been directing the lighting for Ozzy-involved shows since 1999, is once again behind the console for this tour. New to the design team this year is programmer Eric Marchwinski and senior lighting designer from Woodroffe-Bassett, Terry Cook.
“I couldn’t be happier working with the team that’s been put together for this project,” says Cook. “While Patrick and Michael have worked with these particular artists before, I am the new guy, and it’s been quite a design experience dealing with something of this size with an act of this caliber.” Terry had been working on large scale corporate and theater shows with lighting designer Adam Bassett for several years. When Woodroffe and Bassett formed a partnership 1n 2013, Cook was thrilled to come on board as an associate with the firm.
A Superstructure/Pod Setup
“The key to this design working is we need a lot of height, as you see,” Cook points out. “There is a superstructure that loads in prior to the actual lighting pods, and we like to have the bottom of that reside approximately 65 feet from the arena floor. The front truss today resides 55 feet off the floor.”
Besides the front truss, some side torms and a couple of audience light trusses, the bulk of the lighting lives in custom pods that were designed by Stufish and built by Tait. The 60-foot-wide stage has no actual set. With the exception of a drum riser and a line of bass and guitar amps, there are no thrusts, lifts or stage gimmicks of any type. In essence, the massive back wall and roof of lights makes all the statement these rockers need as far as a physical set.
The tour utilizes the in-house stage at every arena. The Upstaging lighting crew erects four sticks of 30-inch super truss positioned up and down stage. Hung underneath them is a traveling system from Tait that appears to work like a big garage door opener. A giant wall of lights can lift off the ground and flatten out (or stay at a raked angle) like a garage door does when paused. This system of moving the humongous pods is all run from a Tait Navigator motion control system.
There are a total of 35 Tait truss pods, custom built at 10 feet wide by six feet high. They bolt together in lengths that span 50 feet across the stage. There is a row along the upstage floor underneath a large LED wall. Above that video wall is a static pod wall that hangs almost straight and is configured with five pods across and three high. Just downstage of this set is the equal sized pod structure that moves. At one point during the show, the roof is in a totally upright position. It appears to join the upstage wall, forming a massive block of lights that simply shouts “Heavy Metal.”
The custom lighting pods are designed to travel all over the world. The pods house the show’s 105 Martin MAC Viper AirFX fixtures. Each pod has a row of Viper AirFX that stick straight out from the pod. For transit, the crew removes a pin and the Vipers lower down in the pods so they can fit four across in the truck. These are hung symmetrically to present the audience with block of light that can be made of hard or soft edged light beams with this hybrid fixture.
Cook explains the design’s main choice of fixture, “We chose the Viper AirFX because we wanted a good source of light with a multi-function element. But we also wanted a large format fixture, a profile light that is large in size as well as its beam. We didn’t want lots of tiny beams as much as we wanted it to feel like a giant, thick wall of light.”
In each pod, TMB Solaris Flare Jr. fixtures are mounted. The flares serve as a bright overall wash as well as a strobe fixture. When asked why they went for the Junior Flare models, Cook notes that “we strategically interspersed the Flare Juniors around a bunch of 2-lite DWE mole fixtures in the pods. The juniors are approximately the same size as the moles. When we turn them all on in white, it makes a bold statement of light illuminating the arena.” Keller adds to this, “With the flares, we don’t get a separation in beam. So if we turn them all on in the same color, we have a big solid wall of color, then the Viper beams can zoom in and cut through to give it all dimension.”
The Lighting Team
After 17 years of lighting Ozzy, Keller is invaluable for three simple reasons. He knows what color Ozzy expects a song to be, he nails his cues on time, but more importantly, he knows when the boss wants to see his people. Besides having 36 2-liters in his rig, Michael has another 24 4-liters on the audience trusses and nine 8-lite moles across the downstage truss to light the crowd on cue. If his hands are busy busking faders, it’s no big deal to light the arena at any time. Upstaging provides him with a foot switch under his grandMA2 to activate them all.
One of the final pieces the Woodroffe-Bassett team added was programmer Eric Marchwinski. Terry Cook explains how Eric works, “I would ask him to come up with something clever for a cue. He would put his head down and stare at the screen, then move his hands in a flurry of activity for a minute without ever looking up. Then he would activate the cue and just look at us and say ‘How’s that?’”
Eric had this to say about working on this project. “It was really an exciting show to program. I spent a week in previz setting up the cue structure and console. On site, we programmed four to five songs a night, on top of the usual clean up notes. The breakneck speed was achieved by the great dynamic between Terry, Michael, and myself. Michael knew exactly how the show needed to playback, and general cues that the band expected. Terry worked with Michael on color choice and taking ideas and concepts from the past tours, cueing and updating them into the existing fixtures and layout. Meanwhile, I sat listening to both of them, programming and auditioning ideas as they developed them on the fly. This allowed us to quickly power through ideas, looks and cues without going too far down the ‘rabbit hole.’”
Lighting the Band
The design team also knows that front-of-house spot lights are a no-no with Ozzy. Instead, they opted for a front truss full of Robe BMFL spots. “In this scenario, this really was the best choice,” points out Cook. “We have six BMFLs outfitted with handles and rigged off the top of the front truss. Two are assigned per principal players in the band and one without a handle for the drummer. They are predominantly kept in white the whole show to isolate the players from the huge wall of light,” Keller adds, “The folks at Robe are really clever. They knew this light would be utilized as a spotlight because of its ability to cut right through video and other lights. They have a setting in the control panel that not only disables the pan and tilt from the console, it allows the user to set how rigid or easy the pan and tilting of the fixture will be for the operator.”
“With a wall of moving lights behind the band, there was really no place to put rear truss spots.” Cook admits. “Keller and I both felt we needed a consistent backlight to highlight the three downstage members. We hung some side torms high upstage with three additional BMFL’s locked in a focus on the three player’s areas, from both sides.” These lights remained on for most of the show and never distracted from the complex looks and chases emanating from the wall. The performers were all ringed nicely with a bright halo when shown on the video wall.
More BMFLs were used on the front truss to light the amp line and join the downstage torms as accent lights while forming a bright surround to the wall of light. Twenty-seven Clay Paky Mythos fixtures were scattered in downstage torms, the front truss and the floor to give some aerial vectors of light and tight pencil beams for effects. Each band member also had footlights placed downstage of their positions for some front uplighting. “We utilized SGM Q7 LED fixtures specifically,” says Cook. “We wanted a little bigger format of LED wash light but, most importantly, Ozzy has a penchant for throwing water at his shows. The Q7 is an IP65 rated fixture so we didn’t have to worry about it getting wet.”
Out in the house are two 40-foot audience light trusses. Each contains a dozen Vari*Lite VL3500 FX Wash fixtures that are completely programmed into the show’s cues, often mimicking the looks on stage. This allows Keller to light the audience in color at times. Of course $3 million worth of technology in the air isn’t complete without the 80 feet of white rope light that surrounds the edges of the stage. “Job security lights for us,” says Keller.
The Video Setup
Before the show starts, a white cyc measuring 62 by 57 feet (WxH) is hanging mid-stage. This fabric serves double duty. It starts out behind the opening act, 16 feet upstage of the downstage edge, serving to mask the giant light wall. At set change, the curtain travels downstage on the Tait trolleys until it’s set in front of the stage. It will act as a projection screen for the start of the show before the kabuki solenoid system drops it to reveal the band.
The performance starts with a two-minute video depicting “The End” with breathtaking custom video content produced by Sam Pattison, the legendary content creator whose work has been seen on other high profile Woodroffe-Bassett shows. A single Barco 40K projector from front of house is used to project the image. Off to the high sides of the stage are two more rear-projected screens that are fed I-Mag through a single Barco 20K projector. PRG Nocturne provides the video components.
Once the opening video finishes, the band strikes a chord, the kabuki drops and the roof rises up to reveal a video wall measuring 55 by 15 feet (WxH). Comprised of PRG Nocturne’s V12 product, the wall has a pixel count of 1368×360. Its shape is not typical, yet seems so natural in this design. The custom content was made to fit this size, but it also looked beautiful with the use of some special I-Mag treatment.
Crew chief Eric Geiger heads a team of only five Nocturne employees out there. He and one person look after the wall while Lindsey Haney cuts the cameras. This is her first tour with Nocturne, but from all accounts, she’s doing a bang-up job. Working with only one FOH long lens, two handhelds in the pit and a couple of lipsticks, she comes up with plenty of great shots, especially through the use of a few toys.
I-Mag is treated differently, for the most part. The video team achieves this by running the video feeds out of Haney’s Panasonic switcher into a d3 media server. The d3 is equipped with this cool software program they called Notch, which is a real-time effects generator. The d3 was specified because there was very little lapse time with the camera feed going directly into the server on its way to the LED wall. Engineer Jason Lipton uses the Notch software to manipulate an image by applying all kinds of textures and tones to the musicians’ actual body and face. In one song, there would be psychedelic colored waves of lights emulating from body parts. At other times, the images could look grainy and even distorted. At no time did the viewer realize they were staring at men approaching their 70’s on stage.
Special FX and Rigging
Pyro effects were used sparingly, but when applied, the guys from Strictly FX brought the heat. Besides bowls of flame on top of the amp line, one of the finale numbers included big bursts of propane flames choreographed to the hard rhythms. Shooter Reid Nofsinger had a long volley of comets working upstage during one song that was just sheer beauty to watch. The boys from Strictly FX also layered the stage in low lying fog for “Iron Man,” and confetti later on.
Rehearsals started in Omaha with little more than a week to get the system and stage tweaked before the first show. Dale “Opie” Skjerseth was in charge of putting the tour together as he’s done with this camp before. He only had a few days on site before heading to another gig and handing off production manager duties to George Reeves. It’s George’s second go-round with this camp, having done the 2013 tour as well. He’s backed by his trusty production coordinator Maya Gas who runs the office, and his stage manager Sean Robinson in the arena, both of whom, Reeves is quick to point out, “do one helluva job. I can’t say enough good things about these people.”
“On a good day with a pre rig, John Chiodo and his Upstaging crew can get this rig up in an amazingly quick time. We save money and a truck by not carrying a stage, but by assembling a good core of players we just loaded in what’s only our third show, in just four hours,” boasts the production manager.
When asked about Upstaging’s relationship with this camp, account rep John Huddleston has this to say. “For the past decade or more, we been involved with Ozzy, Ozzfests and Black Sabbath. We have worked with some of the most professional people in the industry. We are really lucky to have been involved — Charlie Hernandez, Dale Skjerseth, Michael Keller, Patrick Woodroffe and many others on these tours taught us a lot about how professional tours are planned / designed and operated.”
Happiness seems to abound everywhere as it’s evident this is a seasoned, all-star crew out here. No screamers, no anger. Just a competent bunch working towards one goal, “The End of Sabbath.”
Crew
- Creative Director: Patrick Woodroffe
- Lighting Designer: Terry Cook
- Lighting Director: Michael Keller
- Lighting Programmer: Eric Marchwinski
- Tour Director: Dale “Opie” Skjerseth
- Production Manager: George Reeves
- Show Design: Ray Winkler
- Production Coordinator: Maya Gas
- Stage Manager: Sean Robinson
- Lighting Co: Upstaging
- Upstaging Rep: John Huddleston
- Lighting Crew: John Chiodo (crew chief), Bart Buckalew, Logan Hutchins, Yoshi Shinohara, Kenny Rutkowski, Brian Reed
- Video Co: PRG Nocturne
- Video Director: Lindsey Haney
- Video Engineer: Jason Lipton
- Video Crew: Eric Geiger (crew chief), Mark Woody (cameras/projection); Steve “ Bone” Gray (cameras/LED tech)
- Riggers: Robert Slepicka (head rigger), Willy Williams
- Set/Automation Co: Tait
- Automation/Carpenters: TK Woo, Brittaney Kiefer, Dion Pearce
- Special Effects: Strictly FX
- Pyro Shooter: Reid Nofsinger
- Pyro/Confetti: Eddie Romack
Gear
Lighting:
- 2 grandMA2 full size consoles
- 105 Martin MAC Vipers
- 26 Clay Paky Mythos fixtures
- 24 Vari*Lite VL3500 Wash FX
- 21 Robe BMFL Spots
- 6 Robe BMFLs w/Spotlight Kits
- 62 TMB Solaris Jr. Flares
- 9 SGM Q7 fixtures
- 36 2-Lite Mole Feys
- 24 4-Lite Mole Feys
- 9 8-Lite Mole Feys
- 6 Reel EFX DF-50 hazers
- 35 Tait light pods
- 21 Sections of HUD Truss
Video:
- 2 PRG Mbox studio servers
- 2 d3 media servers w/ NOTCH software
- 1 V12 Nocturne LED display (55’ x 15, WxH)
- 1 Panasonic switcher
- 2 Barco 40K HDQ Projectors
- 2 Barco 20K HDQ Projectors
For more Black Sabbath ‘The End’ tour photos by Steve Jennings, go to http://plsn.me/PLSN-Sabbath-2016
