Mark Foster is another one of those talented musicians who worked for many years to become an overnight sensation. One day you’ve never heard of them; the next day, they’re everywhere. Like thousands of hopefuls, Foster moved to Los Angeles after high school to chase a career in music. After several years of onerous odd jobs and stillborn bands, he landed work with audio production house Mophonics as a commercial jingle writer, giving us immortal works for California Tourism, Cadillac and Muscle Milk.
The experience taught him how to write tight, concise arrangements and quick hooks, and to score and produce in all manner of styles and genres. In 2009, the multi-instrumentalist formed the trio Foster & The People, which people misheard as Foster the People. The variation stuck. Their genre-busting music has been variously described as indie pop, alternative rock, indietronica, alternative dance and neo-psychedelia.
In early 2010, Foster wrote and recorded a song at Mophonics called “Pumped Up Kicks,” offering it on his website as a free download. It quickly went more viral than the plague, and its inclusion on the band’s self-titled 2011 EP made it a worldwide hit. Club appearances went from playing to a couple of dozen patrons to having to turn away hundreds of fans. Radio stations, especially Sirius XM satellite radio’s “Alt Nation” channel, added the song and it also turned up on television series (Homeland, Gossip Girl, Vampire Diaries, Friends With Benefits, Entourage) and several commercials. Appearances at the Coachella and South by Southwest festivals, as well as on many late-night chat shows and Saturday Night Live amplified the buzz.
The group soon signed with the Monotone, Inc., management agency and in May 2010, inked a multi-album deal with Columbia imprint Startime International. With the release of the debut full-length album Torches in May 2011, “Kicks” reached stratospheric heights on most charts. A tour of the U.S. and Europe followed, as did two Grammy nominations for Torches and “Pumped Up Kicks,” which, at 3.84 million copies, finished 2011 as the sixth-best-selling digital song of the year. The band’s second studio album, Supermodel, came out in March, 2014.
Nine People, Multiple Hats
Enter veteran lighting designer Matthieu Larivée, owner and creative director of Lüz Studio, which he founded in Montreal in 2005. “We’re a small, growing company specializing in visual design, including lighting, set design, and video,” he explains. “Our nine people all wear several hats, and we bring on extra help as needed.”
Though Larivée’s college background is in electronics, while in school, he worked at the local theater and “never stopped.” A member of IATSE for 10 years, he did technical work on big concerts. He was an assistant lighting designer for Celine Dion, and also worked on musicals, corporate events and two Cirque du Soleil productions — Wintuk at Madison Square Garden and the touring show Amaluna. His real school, he says, was working in Quebec with the legendary lighting maestro Yves Aucoin. “He’s untouchable. Working with him, I needed to be very sharp at all times. There was no option to be wrong. It had to be perfect every time. Thanks to him, after a few years, my name got to be well-known in Quebec.”
In his years of working on music and theatrical productions, Larivée grew frustrated at having to use stock video footage that was not tailored to specific events. This led him to begin hiring his own graphic designers and to start his own firm. Lüz Studio’s talent for integrating video and lighting that give shows a visual unity became a style that got it noticed throughout the industry. Major concert, theatrical and corporate projects and significant awards soon followed. For example, the company won the Middle East Lighting Designer of the Year Award and a Parnelli Award nomination in 2008 for their work illuminating the pyramids in Egypt for the PBS television special, A Night at the Pyramids, with singer Chantal Chamandy. More industry recognition followed for the Nutcracker ballet in 2013.
Not all of the agency’s projects have involved swinging for the fences. For Love, Loss and What I Wore, a small play consisting only of five women sitting on chairs talking about life for an hour and a half, Larivée and company mapped constantly changing video onto a wall of about two dozen mannequins behind the actresses, using just his iPhone.
The world tour pairing Adam Cohen (son of Leonard) and Rufus Wainwright (son of Loudon) was a small but very efficient production setup that was scalable from small clubs to large theaters. On the basis of those shows, they were approached by the Grammy-nominated duo Broken Bells (Brian Burton, better known as Danger Mouse, and James Mercer, the lead vocalist and guitarist of The Shins). In a bit of serendipity, Broken Bells has the same management company as Foster the People — Monotone, Inc.
“We designed a ‘retro futuristic’ setup that was all ground-supported,” said Larivée. “The video projector sat on the floor, hidden in a dome. I bought a fisheye traffic mirror on eBay to reflect the projector beam onto a rounded screen that was mounted on the floor, as were all the lights. This made it very easy to play different venues without having to worry about rigging and resetting projector lenses every time. We created a visual identity for them that worked within the small world of any stage in any venue, and on a modest budget. I think that, and the video-mapped mannequins, are what made Monotone think of us for Foster the People.”
Dali-esque Visuals
Lüz Studio was called five weeks before the Supermodel tour to propose a show design. Since the range of venues was large, they decided not to go with video projection at all because “it can be a nightmare. With Broken Bells, it was easy to use, because there’s no lead singer in the center. They’re very static and stay in the same place throughout the show. Mark Foster, however, is very charismatic and moves all around, so you can’t use a video projector and tell him ‘don’t go there, Mark.’”
Larivée describes the band’s own artwork as very strong, with strange, Dali-esque characters. So Lüz designed trusses that are curved, but in an irregular way that produces a melting look. The renderings were done with wysiwyg and Photoshop. Because the band was extremely busy and traveling to and from one-off shows in New York, Los Angeles, London and Toronto, the Lüz designers presented their ideas to the group via computer. The video content is all animated, created by graphic designers and motion designers working with video director Francis Laporte, “Usually, we start with a storyboard to go over with the band, but because the preparation time was so short, we went directly to animation. That was a challenge at times, like when they were in France, because the band didn’t have a good Internet link or a hard line and the video files were so massive. After we did reach the band, we got a good sense of what they did and didn’t like, which made later videos easier.”
Among the key visual elements in a Foster the People show are 19 four-foot icicles on the floor with lights inside that can be rolled in. In a small venue or a festival, they can use only that component and still have the signature look. Larivée gives major props, so to speak, to Los Angeles scenery shop All Access for creating both the melting icicles using Fiberglas and the curved video screen, which is a flexible product from Screenworks. “They worked hard to make that happen and the result is simply perfect,” he says. In the background are video screens, which can be hung from rigging, but usually they’re set on the floor. Because they’re translucent, lights can be placed behind them. Top lights complete the look. For festivals, if another band has a video screen on stage, Foster the People can use that for its own content.
Going by the energy of the crowd—they do foster the people, after all—the band frequently changes the set list, even just before going on stage, so there’s no progression or time code. Explains Larivée, “The video content and lighting are tailor-made for certain songs, so we can punch those up as needed. We rehearsed with the band in the last week before the tour and marked which songs have videos, so they know not to play too many video songs in a row. It’s still a rock ‘n’ roll show, so they have the luxury of doing what they want in the moment.”
Though some of the songs have very visual titles and lyrics, such as “Goats In Trees,” the band didn’t want to accompanying imagery to be too literal, only that it enhance what they are singing. “Our first draft for that song actually did include goat-like creatures, but the final version was a creepy forest that the viewer enters slowly. For other songs, like ‘Are You What You Want to Be,’ it’s more about the colors and the energy. They didn’t want people staring at the video screen too much. Remember, too, that we only had five weeks to create the video content for 12 songs and the set design. The group told us not to take the obvious or easy way. Instead, they wanted things a little bit weird and not necessarily related to their existing artwork, so we had a lot of freedom.”
Similarly, on “A Beginner’s Guide to Destroying the Moon,” the team first presented a large moon with fists going up to destroy it. That was too literal, so it became lights and strobes, and on the curved video screen, they designed a gradient of white and red going from very light at the top to very dark at the bottom. In effect, they used the video screen as a light wall.
Manual Overrides
The band, with three core members and three added touring musicians, switches instruments all the time, explains the creative director. “Depending on where they are, we do highlight the solos, but the programming is kept loose because the band doesn’t always play the same song the same way. All the song cues, like for an intro, bridge or chorus, sometimes 40 per song, are programmed, plus they can be overridden manually. And we sometimes use internal time codes. For example, ‘A Beginner’s Guide to Destroying the Moon’ has a lot of punches, so when the song begins, we push a button and it starts internal programming that is synced with the band. One of the beauties of doing the work in-house is that we can merge video and lighting. We know not to do something in video because it’s being done in lighting. On ‘A Beginner’s Guide,’ I knew not to have video punches made because I was going to use lighting effects behind the translucent video wall instead.”
Concludes Larivée, “Newer bands seem more conscious about the subtleties of lighting. Sometimes my job is to suggest toning it down a bit, because it can be wearing on an audience to have lights in their faces for an hour and a half. That’s why we had video on only 12 songs out of the whole set. Often, it’s more the way you use the technology rather than having the most up-to-the-minute gadget. You don’t want to have a review in the newspaper the next day that says the lights were great but the band wasn’t as good. That means the lighting designer hasn’t done a good job, because the show is about the artist, not the lights.”
For more information on Lüz Studio, go to www.luzstudio.net.
Crew
Visual Design Co: Lüz Studio/Lighting, Video, Set Design
Production/Lighting Designer: Matthieu Larivée
Lighting Co./Rep: Upstaging/John Bahnick
Lighting Programmers: Hubie Tardif, Zach Matusow
Lighting Director: Kevin Royan
Lighting Crew: Rob Savage, Josh Welch
Video Co./Rep: NEP Screenworks/Randy Mayer
Video Content Directors: Francis Laporte, Alexis Laurence/Lüz Studio
Video/Lighting Programmer: David Lavallée-Gagné
Video Tech: Sean Lee
Production Manager: Michael Weiss
Tour Manager: Dale Lynch
Stage Manager: Richie Bray
Staging Co./Rep: All Access Staging/Robert Achlimbari
Band Management: Monotone Inc.
Gear
Lighting
1 grandMA2 Light console
60 Martin MAC Auras
19 Vari*Lite VL3000 Spots
11 Clay Paky Sharpy Wash 330s
85 Philips Color Kinetics ColorBlast 12s
17 Philips Showline SL Bar 640s
31 James Thomas PAR 46 fixtures
2 DF-50 Diffusion hazers
Video
2 coolux Pandoras Box Media Player Pro (1 for backup)
1 KVM Switch
100 ROE Linx 12mm-1200mm video panels
100 ROE Linx 12mm-600mm video panels
