Topping previous tours takes creativity — and a lotta video.
According to Dean Spurlock, lighting and video content designer for Brad Paisley’s “Bonfires and Amplifiers” tour, the concert “is in your face the whole time.” That’s not so hard to understand when you consider that Paisley threw down the gauntlet and challenged his team to put together his most spectacular concert yet. And he’s not just a man of words — the recent American Country Music Award winner for top male vocalist rolls up his sleeves and gets personally and actively involved in creating the show, even going as far as creating some of the video content in the form of a cartoon that accompanied an instrumental number.
Paisley’s recent show at the Verizon Wireless Amphitheatre in St. Louis had the added bonus of being filmed for Great American Country TV to be shown on Father’s Day. LD Bob Peterson came in to design the TV lighting needed for the HD cameras, and he was careful to keep the original show intact.
“We’re lighting people again — not just moving the lights for effects,” says David Milly, president of TLS, which was the lighting vendor. That said, the show definitely packs a visual impact, starting with the record-breaking 737 Element Lab VersaTubes — 1 meter long by 2 inches round linear LED tubes with RGB pixels. (The sheer volume of tubes set a record, beating the Red Hot Chili Peppers by 17, as their tour used a mere 720 tubes.)
For Milly, the load-in and -out was as important as the look and functionality of it all. But for Spurlock, it’s all about the look.
“I saw how they were being used with the Red Hot Chili Peppers and really liked the way the VersaTubes looked,” Spurlock says. “We had a demonstration with them and some other products in Nashville, and the Element Lab products definitely had the best color and quality.” In the set there are eight tube walls, each 22 ½ feet wide by 5 ½ feet tall, with about four inches between each line of tubes. In the center there is a 23-inch Barco LED screen and the tube walls are staggered like stairs above it creating depth. It fills up the entire stage area.
The VersaTubes are indeed front and center (and side and top) of the tour, but it wouldn’t be a reality without some roadworthy rigging. A chance meeting led Spurlock to Tyler Truss, who designed the structure for safe, easy transport.
“We wanted something for touring where the tubes were inside the frame, and then be able to put them on meat racks, bolted together, and roll them in and out. I wanted to hang lights off the frames as well, so that meant the trussing had to be substantially stronger, and custom brackets were needed.”
Tyler Truss not only fulfilled all the needs and specifications, but turned it around on a dime. “General Manager Scott Almand basically rammed the project through, and they were just awesome. They did a great job and did it all in very little time.” (The units were affectionately referred to as “Almand Bars” in honor of the guy who helped make it happen.)
“For us, it was literally 18 hours a day, seven days a week,” says Bill Edwards, director, marketing/business development of Tyler Truss and Dodd Technologies. From concept to finish, the 68 frames of the rig was put together in four brisk weeks. The trussing includes fold-away, built-in light bars that hold moving lights, 12 frame headers, 18 custom meat racks, assorted rigging accessories, eight corner blocks and 16 medium-duty 20.5-inch 8 and 10 footers.
Running Down the Road
The entire show came together in a week shy of two months. “From yellow legal pad to flying VersaTube walls, it was seven weeks; that was unbelievable,” says Milly. “Tyler GM Scott Almand and team would e-mail pictures as it was be-ing built, and we would e-mail back drawings for modifications if needed. The Tyler team was at rehearsals to tweak a few details, and we were running down the road.”
Milly had worked with Brad Paisley and his team the previous year, and while that was “a pretty big event for us,” it didn’t compare to the challenges and opportunities of this tour. Looking around at such eye-popping shows as those by Kenny Chesney, Rascal Flatts, Tim McGraw and Faith Hill, Paisley wanted to compete, and so he set the bar high.
While Spurlock hadn’t worked that much with TLS, and not at all with Tyler Truss prior to this, he did lean on his four-year relationship with Moo-TV and counted on them to provide the video. For the video content to be displayed on the tubes, they originally hired a well-known professional in the business to draw up some plans, but it left Paisley unimpressed. Spurlock then put pencil to paper, and conversations led to the concept of left and right video screens surrounding a center screen, with VersaTubes layered on top and the “amps” below.
One of the most original elements of the show was simple but effective: when the stage was revealed, there were 60 guitar “amps” stacked on each other across the stage, with risers on top of those. At the start of the show, they all visually hummed with the typical red light indicating that the power was on. The power was on all right, but there was no sound coming out of them. But during a dramatic moment early in the show, they lit up, revealing that they were actually 60 blocks of Barco LED video displays. As the show went on, they were used more creatively adding an additional visual layer.
“Brad really wanted to use the look of amps that lit up, and we talked about different products before going with Barco OLite panels,” Spurlock says. “The custom install into the amps was created by Andy Akers of Akers Theatrical, and from there we wanted the center video wall and then added two other smaller side ones that would move in during the beginning of the show.”
Another highlight is the virtual visit of Alison Krauss, who “appears” onstage and sings a duet with Paisley. “We were trying to come up with a concept that was different. Last year we just put her big on a video center-stage,” Spurlock says. “We thought it would be cool to make her life size, so we filmed a full body shot of her singing, and have her on the right video wall.” The way it’s lit creates a near hologram-like affect. “It gets your attention for a second, because you think it’s really her. It’s just a gag, but it works.”
Other concert highlights include “Mud on the Tires,” where an invisible truck on the video display lays down some pretty cool four-wheelin’, “splattering mud” all over the VersaTubes. Also, one of the more subtle, downright subliminal effects was during this tune when they turned the top tier of tubes into the “headlights” of a truck, complete with turn signal. Only a minority of the audience of the audience could see this, and probably fewer still figured it out, but it was yet another layer that Spurlock and company certainly had fun putting together.
The Vision
Spurlock has been lighting shows since 1992, and has made Nashville his home since 1993. He worked for Vari-Lite on the road with Wynonna Judd before eventually working directly for her in 1997. In 2002 he was hired to work for Paisley and has been building shows for him ever since.
In choosing the content for the video in this show, Spurlock said they thought the stock footage in the High End Systems Catalyst media server would be more than enough for what they needed. But when they sat down and started programming, they decided they wanted specific images. Spurlock hired design partners Benny Kirkham and Kevin “Stick” Bye, who designed shows for Elton John, among others.
“I’ve known Benny a long time, and he had done the programming for me on one of the Judd’s reunion tours,” Spurlock said. “They came up with some great graphics for some songs. Paisley does a song called ‘Ticks’ and they drew a tick, duplicated it multiple times, and then made them crawl all over during that song. They also created some of the paisley pat-terns we used.”
Spurlock and Kirkham spent two weeks hunched over a computer in Spurlock’s house using a 3D model with ESP Vision previsualization software. They set up a 16-foot video screen and the projection allowed them to accurately see how the show would look. Since the VersaTubes are low resolution graphic displays, they were careful on choosing their images, favoring high-contrast images. In the end, the ratio of custom to canned content would end up being 90 percent custom to 10 percent stock.
“It was very cool that we were able to get all that programming done prior to getting into rehearsal,” said Spurlock. Kirkham spent two weeks on the project before he was called back to work on Blue Man Group, and Scott Riley of Level 2 Design also contributed to some of the custom visual work as well. Scott Scoville designed the high-resolution content that appeared on the video screen. “He had ideas, I had ideas; he liked some of mine, I liked some of his. We met somewhere in there!”
There was a concern about the content they chose or created and how it would translate onto the tubes and the quality of the resolution. But from his home studio to reality, it ended up being “very close. I was amazed at how close it was. ESP is definitely one of my favorite products.”
For the first time, Spurlock worked on a MA Lighting grandMA console to operate the show. “Benny Kirkham uses the grandMA and another console, but he recommended this console because it works so much better with such heavy Catalyst work.” As for the learning curve? “Absolutely there was a learning curve. But now I can actually update cues!” he laughs.
Despite his years of experience, Milly still gets excited about what he’s doing and what he’s involved in. It’s refreshing. “I had a great time at the show and the whole time I’m thinking, man this is so neat. It’s spectacular the way it all fits together. I’m like a mechanic who likes to know how a car runs, but to understand those who have the talent to drive it around a track in a race… that’s what Dean does. He makes it walk and talk. We’ve seen a lot of garbage in the air and seen it all come out so distasteful. But this is something else.”
Edwards gives credit to the importance of the vision: “Dean and David and the rest were so well organized, and they knew exactly what they wanted. They had really good people, too, and that allows for something like this to come together so successfully.”
