It started with a scanned drawing of trees with eyes. “We want trees onstage,” said the band members of Las Vegas-based Imagine Dragons. Production designer/LD Richard “Nook” Schoenfeld of Visual Ventures Design was one of three designers approached to turn the scan into an imaginative set for the last portion of their Night Visions tour, dubbed Into the Night.
Schoenfeld drew the full moon taken from their album cover artwork and four Tim Burton-inspired trees (think Edward Scissorhands) and got the gig.
Ticket sales have skyrocketed since the 2012 release of the band’s Night Visions album, which included hit singles “It’s Time” and “Radioactive.” But smaller venues were booked long in advance, so Schoenfeld had to create a three-step design: compact for clubs, expandable to 5,000 seaters and then to arenas.
From Clubs to Arenas
“The challenge was, how to design a club show and use all those elements later when they progressed to larger venues,” he says.
But first, it always starts with the budget.
“When it came to vendors, all year long I told them I really thought this band was going places. Here’s my budget, ‘Don’t make me go somewhere else.’”
He’s using his three preferred vendors on this arena tour: Upstaging for lighting, PRG Nocturne for video and Gallagher Staging.
“When designing, I start with the question: what can I do that nobody else is doing?” Schoenfeld adds.
The design was inspired by the band’s percussion-heavy music — there are 14 drums onstage, not counting the kit. In addition, Schoenfeld wanted a classic rock show. “My band wasn’t born when Pink Floyd was touring. And a circular screen is rarely used,” he notes.
A Circular Centerpiece
The centerpiece is the Floyd-like circular truss, 20 feet in diameter, but Schoenfeld chose not to hang moving lights on it, opting to ring it with 16 Solaris LED Flares. Distributed by TMB, the Flares strobe and chase intensity for a virtual retina burn. Schoenfeld runs them at 6 percent intensity normally “These 16 lights fill the entire arena. It’s like looking into the sun,” he says. “If I bring all the flares to full, you cannot see the video wall. They are intense.”
He designed the rig from a front view. After placing a moon in the center, Nook placed dots on the plot in all the places he wanted lights hung. “I had no idea how to connect the dots when I was done. So I drew a line across these 10 or 20 dots to come up with a truss. Turns out, I had a dream-catcher design that I liked.”
Schoenfeld makes sure his designs will work by using pre-viz studios. “I draw everything in Vectorworks — I can turn it into an EPS drawing and, within an hour, figure out if it will work. Upstaging supplied me their pre-viz studio and warehouse to hang my rig and program. With zero production rehearsal time, this was a necessity.”
All designers have their preferred methods of working. For Schoenfeld, he looks to “the power of three.”
“I work in blocks of three — a triangle — or three of a kind. Chases are always in threes. The best years of my life are always in threes. So, where could I put three Elation Rayzors — 16 groups of three Rayzors fit into it. It’s the power of three.”
The rig is loaded with Elation’s Rayzor Q7 LED moving head fixtures. “It’s an LED PAR can beam that moves. I set up ten banks of six each, with another eight on the floor and thrust, for 68 total fixtures. Turn them all on, and it makes a big rock look. They don’t break; they just keep working,” Schoenfeld adds. “It’s my go-to fixture for four tours now. I can rent them so inexpensively, there’s no reason not to use gobs of them.”
The 18 Martin Vipers are Schoenfeld’s basic stock hard-edge spot lights for band wash and audience gobos. They are positioned up top and offstage for side light, top light and key light.
To cut through the brightness of the video screen, Schoenfeld opted for 24 Clay Paky Sharpys. “They pack a punch,” he says, adding that he aims the Sharpy beams for the roof so that people in the audience and the spotlight operators aren’t blinded by their output.
Schoenfeld’s design complements the Sharpys’ parallel beams with 10 Sharpy Wash fixtures. “It’s a great light —I use them to cut through the video wall brightness and backlight the band members.”
More Bang for the Budget
In keeping with the “budget-driven tour,” Schoenfeld looked for places to chop costs. “I needed a cheap backdrop behind it all. So Upstaging found bug screen (normally used for windows) in 40-foot-long rolls that are four feet wide. If I wrinkle it, I get a good texture for the lights. This cost $400, as opposed to the $4,500 backdrop that I wanted. Looks the same.”
Nook’s four tree drawings were scanned into a laser cutter to create precise, flat, 2D laser-cut metal set pieces. He positions these downstage in front of the bug screen. With another Home Depot idea in mind, Schoenfeld went into MacGyver World — his garage — to solve another problem on the cheap. “I needed incandescent lights to shine in the trees, so I drilled a dozen Mason jars and put an LED light in each,” he says. “It’s basically a homemade porch lamp.” The lights hang on tree limbs, shining like giant fireflies.
Although some lighting designers are venturing into the digital video realm, Schoenfeld turned to Lightswitch’s John Featherstone and Austin Shapely to handle that part of the show. “There is not enough time in the day to do both content and lighting. John and I have collaborated on a half dozen tours now. John can talk to the artist directly about video content, and then we brainstorm over each scenic look.”
Their content travels on the screens at a rapid pace, transitioning from textures like water and nature scenes to transportation systems — train tracks, roads, other images indicating travel. I-Mag is often layered with projected textures on the circular screen to give the video a dimensional quality.
Schoenfeld credits PRG Nocturne for providing “amazing” support. “They gave me my good friend John McLeish — systems engineer/video director — for our tour. Starting with little at first, we’ve expanded from a single 10K projector to two 20K projectors to the current 21-by-21-foot video wall of V-9 high def LED tiles.”
Gallagher Staging has built 20 sets for Schoenfeld over the years. This set features two catwalks on the side and a center T-shaped thrust, allowing the band to get close to the crowd. MAC Vipers and Clay Paky Alpha Beams adorn trusses and scenery that seemingly reach into the side audience.
Schoenfeld controls it all on a grandMA2 console. “It does everything. I’m comfortable running cameras, media and cryo effects through it. I asked for it because it doesn’t require too much thinking. It’s intuitive.”
“Stabs of Light”
Imagine Dragons may be a young band, but its members are not shy in sharing their changing visions about the production. At their Austin, Texas show, Schoenfeld talked about the tweaks on tour.
“The guys will tell me ‘this is beautiful, it’s stunning — but nothing’s happening.’ The band does not want stagnant lighting,” Schoenfeld says. “The band wanted ‘stabs of light.’ The show is more about tempo and a vibe, rather than setting a pretty scene and sitting in it.”
Often, there are new requests. “They say they want Nine Inch Nails smoke — so I added Le Maitre Radiance hazers and eight Cryogenics CO2 jets at the front of the stage. They say they want EDM (Electronic Dance Music) lighting — though they’re not an EDM group — so I keep it moving and pulsing when the music dictates.” Schoenfeld adds that, “coming from clubs, I had to wean the band into using spot lights. The singer is the front man and understands being lit well. The other players are more comfortable with a typical front wash.”
While it’s important to listen to the client, Schoenfeld also heeds tips and tricks from his fellow colleagues. “LD Roy Bennett once told me that you could have 200 lights, but if you turn them all off and just hit the artist with one light, everyone screams,” he said. “It’s true. I have 150 lights in the rig, but it’s the God moment when I turn them all off and use that one beam. The focus goes to one pinspot on the one guy. It freezes the moment, and the audience screams.”
There are others unexpected moments — with the band launching into the Rush hit, “Tom Sawyer,” for example. To prepare the right lighting vibe for this one, Schoenfeld contacted Rush’s lighting designer Howard Ungerleider and asked, ‘How many cues are in the song?’ Howard said ‘400-something.” Schoenfeld ran it old school, bouncing manually between hitting 20 faders at any time. He paid homage to the master with matrix- like shafts of beams.
And then there is a “Radioactive” moment. The fiery-looking sphere projected onto the circular screen appears to pulsate, to gather flames, to emit such an intensity that Schoenfeld calls it the “retina burn” cue sustained through the entire song. It’s a guaranteed crowd pleaser. And judging by the response, the whole show was a winner — musically and visually.
Schoenfeld — a veteran LD of more than 25 years — prefers to send out a director to handle road duties on his design while he moves on to the next tour. However, with Imagine Dragons and their radioactive rise to fame, he’s keeping his hand on the wheel — or at the console — to ensure their production rolls happily — into the night.
