Daughtry, the group fronted by Chris Daughtry – and also, incidentally, the group who has embraced my favorite font, Bleeding Cowboys – is on tour in 2010. After finishing up some shows in the U.S., the tour is moving to Europe and then on to unspecified locations to entertain U.S. troops. Then it's back to the States for more dates in the U.S. As Daughtry's LD, Matt Mills, says, "This one is going to go for awhile." Passing the Torch
The show was designed by Sooner Routhier, a freelance lighting and production designer, who designs for Rage Against the Machine, Motley Crüe and many others. Routhier then passed the tour off to Mills when her design dance card filled up. Mills and Routhier have known each other for many years, and Routhier had seen Mills' work for 3 Doors Down. So she had no problem handing a lot of the creative control over to Mills after her initial design was finished.
Routhier says of her collaboration, "I've been working with Shabba (Jonathan "Shabba" Linton), the tour manager, for a while now. He often asks me to submit designs for his clients. I started designing for the band in 2007 when Shabba first began working for them. At that point they were doing mainly clubs and small theatres, so not much in the way of production. But Shabba always likes to add the extra production element when he can. So any time there was a one-off or tour that merited a bit of lighting, we tried to put something together to fit their needs; most of the time that meant a small lighting/scenic package that was easy to roll on and off stage for a festival or opening act situation.
"This tour design was all about the album artwork," she continued. "Comic book artist Jim Lee put together some amazing images that the band wanted to incorporate into their set. We didn't want to interfere with the artwork at all as the images are strong and extremely provoking. Also, with the budget constraints, we weren't able to incorporate them into the set like I originally wanted. So we opted for a kabuki system with four backdrops to be triggered in time with pyro hits at various moments in the set list."
Layering the Stage
The set includes a series of scaffold towers, ramps and open stairs that are silver on the underside. They provide for form and function for the band to run around on and for the lighting instruments to play. "I wanted to keep the scenic and backline component of the stage open to expose more of the backdrop art from behind," Routhier said. "I placed lights throughout the scaffold to bounce off the silver and shoot reflecting beams around the stage. This helps the skeleton set from disappearing when the backdrop is lit from the front. It also adds a nice layer of saturated color to the stage."
Shabba and the band contributed to the design in their own way. According to Routhier, they typically have a basic idea of how they want the show presented to the audience. Her job is to interpret their needs and deliver the design.
"I use Vectorworks and Renderworks to render images of the scenic and lighting design. I try to provide as many angles as possible with different lighting looks and create a presentation that shows the progression of the show from beginning of the set list to encore. We often go through many different workings of the design and cut or add where needed to fit the budget of the show."
Fit For Duty
Routhier was unable to be there for production rehearsals and programming. But she had no problem turning the job over to Mills. "I had full confidence in Matt's cuing choices. He's the perfect lighting director fit for Daughtry. And he didn't disappoint! His timing is impeccable and I was really happy with the way the lighting cues turned out. He really tried to use different color palettes than you would see at most rock shows. Those color palettes complemented the backdrop imagery nicely."
Mills was happy to be given the freedom to add some more of his ideas to the tour as well. "This rig was pretty straightforward but I was able to get them to change out the downstage truss from 20-inch to HUD truss," he says. This made load in a lot easier and also helped out the truck pack. "I made a few minor changes (to the design). I changed all the floor (Martin) MAC 2000 XB washes to the PC lenses. I liked the ACL type of look I was able to get out of them, and when you zoom wide, they produce a nice even field. After several revisions and budget cuts Sooner ended up having to put Martin Stage Bars on the six down pipes because we had a lot of them available. This was the only thing that really bothered me about the final version of the plot. So we talked about it, and I convinced her to beg our account rep, Martin Kelley, for some sort of moving fixture that we didn't already have in the rig, something that was just sitting around the shop that hadn't been used in a while, some sort of fixture that was different but wouldn't break the budget. When I got there, they handed me six Elation Impressions. I thought it was a joke! What the hell was I going to do with this little LED fixture against MAC 2K XB washes and VL3000s? Well, I learned the old lesson about judging a book by its cover. This little LED fixture is super bright, super fast and makes some great colors. This was exactly what I was looking for, and it steals the show every night. Every show I have someone asking me about them or making some sort of comment about them."
A 1980s Metal Fan
Mills, who is based out of Orlando Fla., has worked as an LD and/or designer/programmer for groups like 3 Doors Down, Nelly Furtado and Enrique Inglesias. He began his career in lighting 14 years ago in Jacksonville Fla. "I was a big 1980s metal fan and went to a lot of concerts in Jacksonville, where I grew up," he says. "I always noticed the lighting and was always intrigued by it. I eventually lied my way into a gig at a local nightclub and learned all I could about the (High End Systems) Intellabeam and Emulator controllers. Other local nightclubs noticed what I was doing and offered to pay me to program the lighting in their clubs. During this time I had just finished school for auto mechanics and I became one. So I was working as a mechanic Monday through Friday, and on Friday and Saturday I was having fun working in nightclubs running the lighting. I ended up taking a vacation to Disney and noticed they had a lot of lights there. I decided to send them a resume and got a call back. I went in for an interview with Disney and House of Blues and got the job at House of Blues. I learned a lot there, lighting different bands each night. Shortly after that, I got a call back from Disney and took a full time job there and shifted to part time at House of Blues. After a few years of that, I started working for Christie Lites, which is where the 3 Doors Down gig came from."
Mills prepped the Daughtry rig at Epic Production Technologies in Oxnard, Calif. "This was my first time working with Epic, and I was very impressed," says Mills. "They got a copy of the plot and actually had some of our main looms already made for us when we showed up for prep. All we had to do to finish the looms was to add the breakouts and data jumps. As simple as this sounds, it made for a very good prep experience. I'm used to shops just pushing all the gear over in a pile for you to sort through. It wasn't like this at Epic at all. We were able to fly the rig and get it all rung out before going into rehearsals," he says. "The guys would build it during normal shop hours and I would come in at the end of the day and stay into the night programming. We were there for four days and then we had three days of rehearsals before the first show in Topeka, Kan.
For the Daughtry show, Mills began his programming on the grandMA with a page for every song. "I do this a lot, because it gives me plenty of space to add unique hits and stabs for each song," he says. "While I do have a startup disk with all my profiles and palettes on it, I approach every tour differently and program for the specific needs of the show. For Daughtry, every night before the show I'll have a look at the set list and make sure all my songs are in the right order. I have a pretty cool macro I use that jumps to the next page, selects the next cue stack, turns everything else off and takes the first cue of the selected cue stack. I have had good success with it and other people that I have programmed for like it a lot. I have a lot of people ask me what the syntax is so here it is:
PAGE +; SELECT EXEC 1; DEF_GO; OFF PAGE 1 THRU – PAGE.
Phoning In the Job
When asked if he had any good stories from the tour, Mills related a couple of stories. "Well, since I was the new guy out here, I tried to fly under the radar until everyone got to know me better. One day the band came in and saw me on stage and thought I was texting on my phone, after a few minutes they realized I was actually focusing the lights using the MA Remote App on my iPhone. I got some pretty funny, baffled looks from that one. Then there were a few "last-night-of-the-tour" pranks. During the first openers set we lowered their backdrop truss to reveal Daughtry playing a cover of the Scorpions' "Rock You Like a Hurricane." And during the second openers set, on their last song there's a part where the song stops and the stage goes dark. We dropped the kabuki and they had to finish the song behind the drop."
Mills says the crew works well together, and he is quick to thank his crew chief, Gary Curtis and his master electrician, Colin Dimock as well as Routhier, the band and the rest of the crew, both on the road and at Epic.
