In 1980, Sean "Motley" Hackett saw a Kiss concert and he was immediately hooked on the spectacle of it all. That was the moment he knew he wanted to be a roadie, or do whatever it took to be involved in big rock shows. The Australian eventually became the lighting designer for INXS and toured with them for many years. Brian Hartley has been designing the lighting for Kiss tours since 1994. But Hartley had his hands full with Trans-Siberian Orchestra and Aerosmith when Kiss's Alive 35 Tour came around. So Hackett's dream of designing for Kiss came true when the job fell to him. Hartley and Hackett had worked together on previous Kiss shows and Hackett was Paul Stanley's LD on his Australian tour, so the choice of LD was an easy one.
Hackett designed and programmed the lighting, and he is on the road with the tour carrying out the directing duties. According to Hackett, Kiss, now represented by Gene Simmons, Paul Stanley, Tommy Thayer and Eric Singer, "likes it big with all the gags. Gene flies, Gene spits blood, Paul flies to a second stage at the front of house," Hackett said. "Then there's Tommy's guitar solo, Eric's drum solo, and so on."
Kiss is known for their larger-than-life productions, so the presentation is a family affair. Each of the members was involved in shaping the show.
"The band watched a front of house video of the show in rehearsals to see what might be added or deleted," Hackett explained. "Tommy had specific ideas for the lighting in his guitar solo, which we did in rehearsals."
The lighting is as much a part of the signature look as the costumes and special effects. With a handful of Syncrolites, it was important to find utility lights that could compete.
"I use mainly the (Vari-Lite) VL 3500 Washes, as they're the brightest beam with the beam blaster in them," Hackett said. "There is so much light coming off the stage that it was the only thing that cut through."
Over the Top
Hackett calls this "a classic Kiss show," and he is running it using an MA Lighting grandMA lighting console.
The over-the-top production style of a classic Kiss show is a given, but this tour represented a huge leap in the technology used on the set. In the past, the backline was one of the more prominent features of the set, with a wall of larger-than-life amplifier props dominating the look. This time, the backline had a twist.
Video director David Neugebauer explains:
"One of the biggest differences was that instead of the traditional tiers of cabinets, the bottom row remained but the upper, subsequent rows were replaced with ‘cabinets' consisting of Saco/Vidicon V-9 LED panels. There are a total of 52 of these boxes, and two half-size boxes, and each box was roughly three feet by three feet. Then there is the upstage center LED display, also made of the Saco/Vidicon V-9, which measures approximately 54 feet by 18.5 feet. We also had stage left and stage right I-Mag screens which measured approximately 17 feet by 27 feet."
The set was the brainchild of production manager Patrick Whitley, who worked with Bob Hughes of All Access Staging and Productions to fabricate the set. It consists of a group of set carts in which the LED panels were installed and wired.
"It was a clever design," Neugebauer said, "in that the carts rolled off the truck and onto the stage and then were clamped together. Then the video sections were jumpered together and there it was, ready to go."
Saving Man-Hours
Having the video panels built into the set carts and having them all internally wired saved many man-hours, according to Neugebauer. Nocturne LED techs Justin McLean and Brian Bateman were responsible for the set LEDs.
"I am pleased and proud to say that they were failure-free for the entire run," Neugebauer reported.
How to use the massive video real estate presented an interesting design challenge. The solution was to go to 720 lines of progressive video.
"We treated the set video bits as a single frame of video and the boxes were sectioned out of the frame," Neugebauer said. "These boxes were laid out onto a 1289×720 video frame and then all content was created in 720p HD using the template. As the set design developed and changed, several templates were created and then discarded by myself and graphics lead, Mark Devlin of Mark Devlin Visuals. The majority of these graphics were created by artistic director Jonathan Beswick (veteran director Kiss tours for a decade) and Mark Devlin Visuals. As the tour progressed and the set list changed, I ended up building about a third of the visuals used. I literally burned up two laptops doing it, but it kept the days off from being boring."
Video Processing
The 720p graphics and visuals were loaded onto and played back from Doremi Labs Nugget MPEG-2 HD/SD media servers. The core video system was a Grass Valley Kayak 150 switcher based in a 32×32 matrix system. The upstage video wall was used mostly for I-Mag but there was also a large amount of multi-image visuals "to try to keep it interesting," Neugebauer said.
"Due to the odd size of the upstage center wall and the fact that the band chose to use standard definition cameras, I wanted to be able to place multiple images on this wall without reducing the image in the SD world and then stretching it over the 1824 pixel wide screen," Neugebauer continued. "So we used a Vista Systems Spyder, which is a picture-in-picture device that allows us to mix various resolution signals and output them in plethora of video output resolutions."
Neugebauer directs, cuts the cameras, and cues assistant director and USC video wall tech Eugene McAuliffe. According to Neugebauer, McAuliffe did "the lion's share of the programming" and ran the Medialon, controlling the feeds to the LED, both stage and USC wall. Stefaan Michels was the system engineer and crew chief. The rest of the crew includes lead LED tech Justin McClean, LED tech/camera operator Brian Bateman, projection/FOH camera op Mike "Sinky" Sienkiewics and LED tech/camera op Chris Kemp.
"I couldn't think of a better group of guys to work with in this biz," Neugebauer said. "They truly do rock."
CREW
Lighting Designer/Director/Programmer: Sean "Motley" Hackett
Video Director: David Neugebauer
Lighting Crew Chief: Sean Kohl
Lighting Techs: Andrew Figueroa (Kiss set lights), Tony Dorman, Rhane Rhodes, Joe Eager, Sooner Routheir, Mike Tengdin
Video Crew Chief: Stefaan Michals
LED/Video Techs: Justin McLean, Brian Bateman, Eugene McAuliffe, Mike Siekewicz, Chris Kemp
Pyro Shooter: Pete Cappadocia, Stage & Effects Engineering
Production Manager: Patrick Whitley, Robert Long
Tour Manager: Mike Amato
Lighting: Epic Production Technologies (Burton Tenenbein)
Video: Nocturne (Bob Brigham)
Pyrotechnics: Stage & Effects Engineering
Staging: Touring Resources (Chris Sorlie), Accurate Staging (Steve Carlsen)
Effects Lift: All Access Staging & Production (Bob Hughes)
Special Rigging: SGPS/Showgroup (Brian White)
GEAR
Lighting Console: 1 MA Lighting grandMA
7 Syncrolites
24 Vari-Lite VL3000 Spots
82 Vari-Lite VL3500 Washes
26 4-Lite DWE (inline)
18 4-Lite DWE (square)
34 Martin Atomic 3K Strobes
58 Philips Color Kinetics ColorBlast 12 LED Truss Toners
4 ETC Source Four PAR NSPs
10 Red Police Beacons
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