Production Designer Yves Aucoin Designs a Fresh New Look for Celine’s First Major Tour in Seven Years
Celine Dion just finished up her first string of touring dates since 2008/09, and designer Yves Aucoin couldn’t have been happier with this show. The production designer for the set, lights and video has been with the artist since 1989, illuminating her for the last 27 years. But up until this last summer, all of her recent shows have taken place at the Showroom at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas since March of 2011, when she first started her much-heralded second residency.
It has been a long year for the artist. Her husband and manager René Angélil had been struck with cancer, passing away last January. René was still alive last fall when talk of an upcoming tour commenced. “There was still a lot of demand for Celine to tour. We set a goal to start up in June. I was actually just leaving meetings at Tait’s complex when I got the sad news of his passing.” This was a huge blow to the whole Celine Dion Touring family as well, Yves points out. “A lot of the people here have been working for Celine and René for 15-plus years. This family is personal friends to all of us, not just an employer. It was good for all of us to ‘get back on the horse,’ so to speak. The shows were really quite emotional.”
The Set
Celine was determined to forge on, as she mentions at the start of her show. The show starts with a white roll drop that’s lowered down to hide the artist’s entrance. A pair of Barco 30K projectors illuminate it as words appear to be written on the fabric. The artist emotionally reads the words while hidden upstage of the banner.
The fabric rolls up to reveal the star at the top of a center, tapered runway that divides the stage in half. The new set was designed by Yves as well.
“In 2015, I started working on a design that would be a whole new approach, with a different set, lighting scenario and video configuration,” he says. “We wanted a new way to showcase her, a show totally different than the designs we had presented at Caesars over the last few years. This started with a center runway with a hydraulic lift upstage so it could tilt. At its highest, the upstage lift is eight feet tall. Its low position is at two feet of height, so there’s always a ramp of sorts on stage.” Scenic fabricators Tait supplied the set.
It takes a lot of space to include 31 musicians on stage. Fifteen of them are string players in an orchestra while the rest consist of the rock band, complete with horn section and background vocalists. Aucoin devised a multi-tiered setup of risers to accompany them. LED tiles line the fascia of the risers. The 60-foot-wide stage has a pretty clear apron for Celine to work, with the exception of the grand piano stage left, which holds the band leader, Scott Price. There are no dancers or anything on stage that distract from Celine. No costume changes or exits from the stage. This show is all about the music and is indeed a concert rather than an entertainment spectacle, but that’s not saying there wasn’t plenty to look at.
The Visuals
Solotech has been looking after most of Celine’s production needs for what seems like eternity. This Canadian company (which has branched out with offices in Las Vegas and Nashville) looks after the lighting and video aspects as well as the audio. “They have been our long term vendor, and I appreciate everything they do for us. I know this may sound cliché, but the young crew I just had out with me is the best crew I can remember in a very long time.”
“The show itself consists of a lot of subtle looks and finesse. But when they want to rock, the band can really kick it up a notch. The band is really rich, musically, and I program the cues accordingly.” The show is indeed scripted, and every accent and tempo change is looked after perfectly. Aucoin doesn’t depend on a whole lot of different types of lights, but he has a lot of surface and players to cover. “I use about 50 [Clay Paky] Mythos fixtures, quite often in the beam mode. For hard edge fixtures, I went with the [Vari-Lite] VL4K spots, while sticking with VL3500FX for the washes. Strobes were all Solaris Flares, while we utilized Chauvet Nexus panels for audience light.”
Across the front apron are a dozen Robe CycFX 8 strip lights. The designer left an open space center stage so as to not distract from the singer when she sits or works that area. The motorized tilt allows him to tilt them towards the audience for eye candy but he admits, “At times I find them quite useful as a footlight and will tilt them upstage to add a warm glow to the neck area that the spotlights can’t hit. This really helps with her screen image.”
Video-wise, the designer came up with a unique look comprised of different sizes of LED screens that were symmetrically lined up. He also lined the fascia of the band risers with more tiles to fill out the look. “We have seven screens upstage that are evenly spaced and set up to get smaller as they rig from center to offstage, so the image appears almost circular, oval in a way. Then we have larger walls either side, located off stage, where you might typically see I-Mag screens at a show. I like to start each song off with a wide scene that spreads content across all of the individual screens. Then, as the song kicks in, I decide how to manipulate it. Quite often, I will use the side LED walls for I-Mag purposes for the people in the back. But I mix the screens up quite frequently.”
All of the video tiles utilized are the same product — SL-Pro 8 LED tiles. This is a proprietary product of Solotech’s. Yves continues to use the d3 as his media server, just as he did for the Caesars Palace shows. He controls the media from his grandMA2 console as well as the lighting. The media content was all personally made for this show by 4U2C, a content creation company that Aucoin runs. We asked Yves how he and his team comes up with video and lighting ideas for this show. “Celine is very involved with her show. Rather than give me definitive ideas of what she wants, we go about it slightly differently. Prior to programming anything, I will sit with her while she hands me a scrapbook full of pictures she has culled from various magazines and online. These pictures are strictly for inspiration; to reflect how she feels inside and give me a cue of her mood. It then becomes my job to sit down with my team at 4U2C to translate for her.”
When Set and Lighting Combine
Above the stage and suspended from the trussing is a kinetic sculpture of light. The lighting design centered itself around this element. Aucoin worked with scenic fabricators Tait to design a system of moving LED objects that could be molded into different configurations by individually lowering or raising each piece in a series of fluid moves. When not in use, the LEDs can retract up to the roof.
The Celine Dion show is the first concert production to make use of the new Tait system of Nano Winches. Above the stage are 170 singly controlled winches that feature a conductive ribbon, allowing for four channels of DMX and power to go down to whatever object is hung from them. These winches can move at variable speeds up to 10 feet per second. The DMX and power are feeding LEDs that are located in a one-meter-long frosted tube. At the bottom of the tube, Yves spec’d a single incandescent bulb. These fixtures were manufactured by Tait as well.
Aucoin explains the process of designing this new toy into his system. “I started out with some ideas, but soon realized I needed to design something that worked more in 3D. From my experience, I found that I needed to somehow set all the winches in line symmetrically, in rows across stage. That way, anyone viewing it from any angle of the arena can see the effect working.” This led to an overhead structure consisting of 12 trusses running up and downstage at a slight angle with staggered heights. These pre-rigged trusses held the Nano Winches and their fixtures for travel. “As it turned out, the trussing configuration made things quite easy for quick, efficient load-ins.” The majority of the lighting itself lives in some upstage trusses that spanned the width of the stage. It’s also hung under video elements and on the floor. “I am quite amazed at how rock-solid this Tait system is. Every day we did more and more intricate programming, and it never let me down. In fact, I have just incorporated 200 of these units into the Caesars show as well.”
The Programming
Yves controls all of the lighting aspects of the show from his grandMA2 console. He runs the lighting and Nano Winch movement all from the same desk. There was to be limited rehearsal time prior to the first shows in Antwerp, Belgium — two days to be precise, so the bulk of the work was done in his own previz studio. “I have my day job, running my company. At the end of the day I kicked the employees out and locked myself with a couple of guys in a room behind the console with the arrangements of music. I have to thank Karl Gaudreau, Alex Barette and Marc Andre Tremblay for the extra hours they spent with me on the programming.”
There is no way a single computer could run a visualizer system with nine video screens playing content, 150 moving lights, 170 LED fixtures and the automation, as it would just bog down to a creepy jittery state. But Aucoin can see the big picture in his head, and he split the visual elements into three monitors. He used his WYSIWYG previz system to look at his lighting programming. He set up the d3 server with a monitor so he could play back and size his content to match the screens. Then he utilized the built in grandMA 3D visualizer for the Nano Winches.
“I was able to come up with the looks and set up the timecode in the cue lists before we ever went into rehearsals.”
The tour played two nights in Antwerp before a nine-show run playing to 110,000 in Paris. They returned to Canada for a 10 night stand at the Bell Centre Arena in Montreal and another five in Quebec City, all French speaking locations. Celine was able to sing many of her songs in her native French Canadian language, but many of her hits remained sung in English. They added two last charity shows for one of Celine’s foundations and, after a short break, headed back to Las Vegas late September. She already has another 70 shows booked there this year. In closing Yves claims, “As far as this production was concerned, it just felt right. I had a really good summer. She sings a Queen song in her set now, called ‘The Show Must Go On.’” Indeed it does.
Crew
Production Designer: Yves Aucoin
Programmers: Karl Gaudreau, Alex Barette, Marc-Andre Tremblay
Lighting/Video Co: Solotech
Lighting Crew Chief: David Bergeron
Lighting Techs: Mathieu Robert,
Anthony Gracia
Lighting/Motor Tech: Yanick Blais
Dimmer Tech: Dany Yockel
Video Director: Mathieu Coutu
Video CDA Server Operator:
Marc-Andre Tremblay
Video System Engineer:
Sébastien Lamoureux
LED Techs: Frederic Fournier,
Eric Simard, Alexandre Charland
Video Server Tech: Louis Philippe Gaudreau
Production Manager: Charles Ethier
Production Assistants:
Shari Weber, Annie Robillard
Tour Manager: Denis Savage
Stage Managers: Alex Miasnikov,
Luc Bertiaume, Michel Dion
Riggers: Johan Van Den Heiligenberg
Carpenters/Automation: Mike Rock, Richard Elliott
Scenic Fabricators: Tait
Gear
2 MA Lighting grandMA2 full size
consoles
1 grandMA2 ultra-light console
45 Vari*Lite VL4000 Spots
22 Vari*Lite VL3500 Wash FX fixtures
52 Clay Paky Mythos
26 TMB Solaris Flare
20 Robe CycFX 8 fixtures
20 Chauvet Nexus 4x4s
170 Tait Nano Winches w/cylindrical
RGBW LED fixtures
3 MDG theONE foggers/hazers
346 Solotech SL-Pro 8mm LED panels
w/LDU8000 processors
3 Barco HDF-W30 Flex projectors
1 Barco FSN1400 switcher
1 Engineering Rack w/Barco Image
PRO II, AJA Ki Pro, Extron DA
4 Sony HDC1500 camera mounts
with Canon lenses (80x, 72x, etc.)
3 Panasonic PTZ cameras
2 d3 Technologies 4x4pro media
servers
ELC Lighting gigabit switches; ELC
node 8s
