From silly punk to serious vibes
When the U.K.’s leading weekly music newspaper, Melody Maker, panned a performance of Thomas Bangalter Guy and Manuel de Homen-Christo — who were performing back then under the moniker Darlin’ — they thought it was amusing that the paper referred to their music as “a bunch of daft punk.” Today, the drum machine and synthesizer duo perform under that name —Daft Punk — and they are known as much for their visual shows as their aural performances. They have a penchant for rousing an audience to a frenzy of dance, and if you happen to look at the FOH position during a show, you just might have seen the band’s lighting and set designer, Martin Phillips, getting into the act himself.
“Yeah, I tend to be that guy in the back jumping up and down like an idiot at the shows I run,” Phillips said. “I find it hard not to. I think that when you’re invested in it, you’re connected to it, and you can always tell the difference in the final product.”
Phillips comes with a production background that includes work with Nine Inch Nails, Incubus, Bauhaus, Billy Corgan and 30 Seconds to Mars. “I jumped up and down a lot for them too,” he noted.
Simplicity Is Key
For the Daft Punk tour, band members Bangalter and Homem-Christo were very involved in the design process. “They have a strong sense of who they are as artists and how they wish to be perceived,” said Phillips. “I had worked with them previously in a much lesser capacity on a couple of their music videos. Simplicity was a key element for them — keeping a clean, geometric look was important as was having a style that lent itself to science fiction, but was suitably versatile. I provided a number of design options and showed them the abilities of the technology I had in mind. Over time, we pared it down until we settled on the current set.”
The lighting rig has stayed relatively unchanged over the years, except for the addition of more Pixel Range PixelLine LED battens. Phillips says the PixelLines mounted on the triangle truss were originally “a kind of throwaway” to break up the distance between the VER Pixelcurtain and the Element Labs Versa Tubes and to hide the fact that the angle of the pyramid was different than that of the Versa Tubes. During rehearsals, he said it became obvious it was a very strong, striking look, so more PixelLines were added to the base of the pyramid to create a lighted triangle.
New Tech for Old
The video content was carefully crafted to join new technology with the look and feel of a different age. “The band wanted to be very ‘analog’ in their footage,” Phillips said. “They felt that as a delivery medium, LED surfaces provided an interesting ‘old look through new technology,’ through its use of very early ‘lo-fi’ computer game graphics from the ‘70s and ‘80s — including Atari styling, wire framework and material by Scanimate, who produced (for the time) cutting-edge computer images.”
In the end, they settled on mostly custom-created video content designed by Baptiste Andrieux and his company, 8VFX, from Santa Monica, Calif. Using the band’s examples as a starting point, 8VFX took the ball and ran with it. “They provided more amazing options than we could have imag-ined,” Phillips enthused.
“We plotted a style course through the show from simple color and moving blocky graphics, through wireframe and Tron-style rendering up to ac-tual photographic images,” says Phillips. Even though it wasn’t that overtly stated, it was something that the audience definitely picked up on, if the cheers were any indication. According to Phillips, when the video screens were finally revealed, the house came down.
The video content, both hi-res and lo-res, is put to good use in the show. “For the Versa Tubes, I found that some of the most effective footage was the ‘aerials’ in the Catalyst stock footage folder,” said Phillips. “The low-res nature of the tubes really lent itself to this look, and we used some of them as a basis for 8VFX to work from. Also, Cedric Hervet, who is the band’s partner and visual collaborator, was onstage during rehearsals, cre-ating additional footage to accommodate the new ideas that arose during that period. He did a lot of editing of the 8VFX stuff to fit BPMs and to work with specific musical parts, plus he created most of the footage used in the final song and the encore.”
The control system included two Flying Pig Systems Hog iPCs running Hog3PC at FOH, one main and one backup, with a couple of DMX512 switches between them. The band has an SMPTE time code track running in tandem with all of the MIDI and music tracks, which then is fed to the consoles “so that we could be deadly accurate with the beats and timing.”
Taking Artistic License
Bob Brigham from Nocturne had worked with Phillips when he was with Nine Inch Nails, so Phillips called him when he started working on this project. Nocturne’s PixelLines are being driven in a couple of different ways. “We didn’t feed video to them at all,” Phillips says. “We just ran them in 10-channel mode and combined programmed chases with the built-in macros.”
Phil Mercer and Simon Pugsley of XL UK provided the media server system for the show. All the video content is run through the Catalyst V4s, which are located offstage. One Catalyst fed the Barco O-Lite LEDs on the pyramid, and the other fed both the Pixelcurtain and the Versa Tubes.
Catalyst technician John McGuire and Pugsley modified the Catalyst system by removing as much of the USB-to-DMX conversion from the sys-tem as possible. They replaced the Catalyst Interface Boxes with a single Artistic Licence ArtNet box, and all the active Catalysts were networked to a single ArtNet box so they all received the same DMX512 signal. For the redundancy, he installed a Barco DVI matrix router so he could take all eight outputs and route them to any or all destinations as needed. This setup provided seamless switching from any server to any source.
“This was the first time I had used the VER Pixelcurtain,” Phillips confided. “On the whole, it performed admirably. The second version was a great improvement in modular design and robustness. The band really liked the look of the LED curtain; it was equally hi-tech and lo-fi all at the same time.”
Phillips is most complimentary of his crew. “Nocturne were most generous, and XL UK bent over backward to assist us,” he says. “Being that it was a collaboration between VER and Element Labs, Jeremy Hochman from Element was always very generous with his time and assistance if we had problems. Jeremy and I have worked together a lot in the last couple of years, and he was key in helping us figure out how to map video images pixel-for-pixel onto the Versa Tubes via the Catalyst. Because of the diagonal orientation of some of the tubes, there was a lot of trial and error with Photoshop files to isolate the exact pixels, but the result was well worth the work. We also stepped up from the standard Versa Tube to the HD version. The difference was marked in light output and color. Suddenly, everyone who had seen the show a dozen times was going, ‘Wow!’ when the tubes came on.”
Although the Barco O-Lite LED panels were not new to Phillips, he admits that it was a challenge to create the pyramid with them. “Blake Steury of VER and I realized that we wouldn’t be able to use the modules in their standard eight-by-eight configuration and housing — that meant creating a completely custom screen surface. Barco provided us with the CAD template for the framework in which the modules stack, and from this, we had the two faces and ‘top hat’ peak made.”
Phillips further says, “Eric Beauchamp helped us work out the geometry and layout of modules within the pyramid surface and designed the ‘ninja stars’ that created the Versa Tube structures. B&R Scenery later redesigned Eric’s original structure so that it would be more road-worthy, and that was the set that we used for the tour.”
Another Eric, Eric Belanger, was originally the tour LED technician who looked after the Pixelcurtain and the Versa Tubes. Later, he became the lighting director for the 2007 tour. “He was my first choice, and I was very happy to have him agree to the position,” said Phillips. “Not only does he have a meticulous knowledge of the gear that we were using, but as an operator, even though much of the crucial beat timing was handled by timecode, he insisted on being able to run the entire show manually in the event of a catastrophic SMPTE failure.”
Phillips and the band were looking for a new twist to add for the encore, and Bangalter jokingly threw out a comment about having themselves light up. That prompted Phillips to introduce them to Janet Hansen of Enlighted, who studied various solutions and presented them with a number of options. But of all the possibilities, they responded strongly to electroluminescent wire. Hansen produces several versions of robots that look like Tron-style wire frame versions of the band. Her collaborator, Anders Nelson, created a DMX512 interface so that the illumination could be con-trolled from FOH. “The final result was one of the highlights of the show,” Phillips muses. “The crowd loved it.”
Phillips is grateful for the opportunity to work on a show that has this degree of technology. “This project has been a pleasure to work on, on many levels. I feel very lucky to have been able to collaborate in creating something different without the limitations imposed by a standard band line-up. And the dancing has been a good laugh, too. Everyone should get to work with robots.”
CREW
Lighting Company, Europe/Japan — PRG (Account Rep, John Lee)
Lighting Company, U.S. — Felix Lighting (Account Rep, David McKinnon)
Lighting/Set Designer — Martin Phillips
Lighting Director/Operator — Eric Belanger
O-Lite Techs — Paul “P.J.” Maddock-Jones, Ted Cognata
Set Carpenters — Doug “Doogie” Eldredge, James “Poop” Poepping
Stage Manager — Tom “Biss” Kelleher
Production Manager — Aaron Chawla
Tour Manager — Sofia Bjorkman
Set Company — Brian Sullivan, B &R Scenic
Video Content — Baptiste Andrieux, 8VFX; Cedric Hervet, Daft Arts
Video Company (Catalyst system) — XL Video UK, Phil Mercer
Video Company (PixelLines) — Nocturne, Bob Brigham
Video Company (O-Lite) — VER Los Angeles, Blake Steury
Catalyst Nursemaid and LED Tech — John “The Kid” McGuire
Lighting Techs — Mike McKinnon, Joel Mannen
EL Robot Outfits — Janet Hansen, Enlighted
Gear
1800 Barco O-Lite Modules
4 Catalyst V4 media server
6 Color Kinetics Color Blast 12s
170 Element Labs Versa Tube HDs
1 Flying Pig Systems Hog iPC running Hog 3PC
2 JEM ZR 33 fog machines
14 Martin Atomic 3K strobes
47 Martin MAC 700 profiles
46 Pixel Range PixelLine 1044s
2 Reel EFX DF-50 hazers
6 VER Pixelcurtains
