For Krewella, a fast-rising EDM act that toured this fall in support of their new album, Get Wet, sisters/vocalists/DJs Jahan and Yasmine Yousaf and producer/DJ Kris “Rain Man” Trindl have generated significant buzz with a sparkling Plexiglas crystal “volcano.”
Inspired by the album’s cover art, designed by V Squared Labs and fabricated by set builder Stefano Novelli of Stefano Novelli Designs and Fabrication, the pyramid is comprised of more than a dozen modular elements built with one- and two-way mirrored acrylic and flexible Illuminode LED tape and lit with light sources within and from outside the structure.
The eye-catching set design is drawing more attention to an act already on the rise. “Everyone is playing Krewella,” says Vello Virkhaus, owner of V Squared Labs. “At [EDM festival] Beyond Wonderland in September, I heard every DJ play some flavor of Krewella remix. They’re blowing up.”
“I think, you have to come close to hitting all five senses with your show,” says Jimmy Russo account executive touring at LMG Touring, who approached Krewella’s management about production assistance back in March 2013. “That’s what people are expecting when they go to a live event these days. Krewella understands this.”
Multi-faceted Reflections
Amanda Hamilton, event architect and designer at V Squared Labs, notes the set can be looked at as a sculpture or an art installation, not just a staging element — and that ties in with the trend for EDM festivals to be as much about visual artistry and sculptural forms as they are about the music itself.
At first glance, the crystal modules appear to be a simple series of asymmetrical geometrical shapes that snap together almost like pieces of a puzzle. But the inner workings of the crystals’ design is a bit more complex than that. The back faces of the crystals are composed of one-way mirror to contain the light, and the front facets are composed of two-way mirror to display the interior effects.
Gaps, or openings, carved into the back panels of some of the crystal modules, allow video content being pumped through FLED F-11 tiles (situated directly behind the clusters on stage) to be reflected inward by the volcano’s acrylic mirrors. The “clusters” in between these crystals are enclosed and their interiors are lined with LED tape.
Having undergone digital and physical testing, V Squared Labs was well aware of the physical ramifications of their design: reflections emanating from the crystal modules are directly linked to the random angles of the crystal faces and gaps in the modules’ back panels — the larger the gap, the weaker the reflective effect.
“This was something that could only be previewed with extremely realistic digital rendering and by building a mock-up crystal,” says Virkhaus. “The LED tape, combined with the video content running through the LED video walls, create two different looks. The design is all about layers and being able to produce different effects.”
“We’re all familiar with projection mapping,” says lighting programmer Aron Altmark of Visual Endeavors. “What Vello and V Squared intended was refractive mapping. Light refracts throughout the crystal, over and over, and video content is reflected and refracted in multi-facets.”
A Modular Design
Once 3D renderings of the crystal modules were completed, the fabrication process got underway. “We made a steel frame with a wood backing, which provides a mount for the mirror plate on the back of the crystals,” says set fabricator Stefano Novelli. “The steel frame goes around that piece of plywood, which is where all your support is coming from. Those cages, upon which all that Plexiglas is mounted, are welded to the outside steel frame.
“This job was really challenging,” Novelli continues. “The only place we had to mount the crystals to each other was via the back, because you’re dealing with Plexiglas on all sides, all the way to the back pieces. Everything had to be attached together from the back. The crystals hanging from the main upstage LED video wall, we hung off a cleat system. Each module has a cleat that mounts onto a bracket, which is then mounted onto the trussing.”
The crystals were completed by the third week of August 2013. After two weeks of rehearsals in Los Angeles, Krewella was ready to tour the volcano in September. Fourteen separate crystal clusters (or five large modular units) were fabricated for ease of transportation and different set up options.
“All the components for the crystals take up a semi,” says LMG Touring’s Russo. “A full 53-footer has been relegated for crystals and another 53-footer is designated for video, lighting and audio.”
The variety of venues creates a host of challenges for the Krewella crew on a daily basis. “We have a meeting in the morning to figure out how to get the rig into the venue without losing continuity to our show,” says lighting director Pete Smith.
“We started with three basic configurations and we currently have 19,” says tour production manager Chris Villanueva. “At the beginning of the tour it was rough. We all knew that things would improve, and [as of this writing] our record for the overall total production with rigging and everything, I think, is down to an hour, ten. Then there were some shows where we were in the support slot, but management still wanted the full set up. The thing is, our setup can’t be taken down in 15 minutes. I told my crew that it might not happen in that time, but they completed an 11-minute changeover. We impressed even the house crew — they didn’t think we could do it, but we proved them wrong.”
A key factor helping the crew achieve that goal are custom carts for the LED walls, notes Craig Mitchell, national sales manager at LMG Touring. The fact that “the screens can be assembled in five or six chunks, as opposed to 100 individual tiles,” along with the lightweight frame design, speeds setup and tear down.
Multiple Video Walls
The design’s video setup uses walls made from FLED F-11 11mm, 5500nit LED tiles. The main LED wall is upstage, with 120 of the 17-inch-square tiles creating an area measuring 24 by 12 feet (WxH). This is flanked L-R by two smaller walls, each with 12 of the tiles, 8 by 5 feet in size. Another video wall in the DJ area uses 40 of the tiles and measures 20 by 8 feet (WxH). All LED walls are secured by trussing.
To help the Yousaf sisters navigate the stage, three-foot-high decking step units are placed behind the DJ area and upstage LED video walls. Along with the need for visual spectacle, V Squared Labs’ Hamilton was careful to keep the scale and flash of the pyramid from overpowering the performers and overwhelming the load-in/load-out time constraints.
Rigging Challenges
Charlie Weiner, an ETCP-certified arena and theater rigger who serves as rigging safety manager at LMG Touring, notes that while “the weight of the main LED wall was under the motors, all of the crystals were outside the motors, making the structure front heavy and causing what we term a ‘cantilever moment.’ It’s the seesaw effect.”
To stabilize the truss structure supporting the LED wall and the crystal clusters, the design calls for a pair of three-foot truss sticks, hoisted by two, half-ton CM Classic motors, to be been placed on either end of the upstage LED wall truss (as per PLASA standards), creating two upside down L-shaped truss configurations.
At LMG Touring’s headquarters in Orlando, FL, weights were tested using sandbags as stand-ins for the crystal clusters. Each crystal modular unit weighs approximately 250 pounds. “We had to overcome the cantilever moment so that the LED wall would hang flat,” says Weiner. “We added those half-ton motors to the rig, downstage, to pick up the front of the [wall] without encroaching upon the look of the crystals. The crystal volcano playground needed to be seen, but not the structure supporting it.”
Punting and Programming
Atomic 3000 strobes and Clay Paky Sharpys camouflage the support structure for the crystals and main LED wall. “Those lights help to hide the trussing, which is black,” says Weiner.
Those fixtures are part of a relatively compact lighting package. There are 12 Sharpys, 7 ColorBlaze 72s (used for performer lighting), five of the Atomic 3000 strobes and six Martin MAC 101s (for washing the set).
“The Sharpys are great for beam effects,” says Virkhaus. “They look like little lasers. Initially I had imagined the crystals as being a more angular disco ball. I knew those lights would have that kind of effect. They blast light everywhere.”
“The Sharpys turned out a lot more versatile than I had anticipated,” says lighting programmer Altmark. “Generally, you’d use the nice thick beam you’d get from a Sharpy to hit the crowd. We do a lot of that. But we also turn the Sharpys inward and shoot the beam right at the crystals. The first day we did that, in rehearsals, it was pitch black, and we hazed the sh— out of the space. The crystals looked like giant pieces of quartz.”
Although each song possesses its own identity, Altmark was sure to maintain visual consistency from night to night. “If it were a traditional DJ tour, you would run it as a busked or even as a time coded show,” he says. “For Krewella, nothing was time coded. We programmed [the show] as one cue stack per song, pretty much rock ‘n’ roll style. Then beyond those [cues] we had some inhibitives — some bumps and subs — leaving some room for improvisation. A lot of minute details may change depending on the audience, or even what the performers are doing. I totally left that end of the lighting up to the operator,” he says, referring to lighting director Pete Smith.
“The show is really broken up into segments,” says Smith. “The live performance aspect is very cue’d. But once the girls and Rain Man enter their DJ set, we go into punt mode. I have a macro that knocks [the cues] out and I can take over, live. When that portion of the set closes, I have another macro that puts the cues back in and we start cueing again. I kind of take what was written and give it a nightly twist, too. I can work the strobes and … choose the intensity and color of the front lighting, which is actually floor light [ColorBlaze 72s]. It’s mysterious and dark and intense. When [the Yousaf sisters] are up performing on the DJ booth, they are also front-lit.”
V Squared Labs scripted a show with a combination of proprietary and Madrix software to synch the visual elements which, as Altmark notes, includes some 2,500 pixels within the crystals alone — each of which is DMX controllable. Madrix, he adds, pixel-maps the LEDs in the crystals, helping to “create waves and modulators and intricate effects” that would be very time-consuming to hand-code. “We can have the set pulse from the center, out, and create a kind of pulse wave. The information for the RGB values of the LEDs is being sent to Pete’s lighting console, a grandMA2, via Art-Net. Pete can control the LEDs and the crystals from his MA2, or he can trigger Madrix and Madrix can control it.”
“I use 18 universes, and 16 are for the crystals alone,” notes Smith. “I’ve seen stadium and arena shows that only use eight universes.”
Video Control
From his station alongside Smith and Villanueva, VJ Max Chang of V Squared Labs controls video output to the LED
including audio-responsive content. “Max’s walls, using V Squared Labs’ video control software, which “has the ability to accept audio,” explains Smith. “He can take the visuals and alter them and not have to worry about driving them to the beat, because [the software] is reading frequencies from the console.
“And because we’re all tied together, Max will get a standard XLR input from Chris that sends signals to him,” Smith continues. “Then [Max] sends the signal to me via Cat5 cable and that goes right into my console. I send [the signal] to the crystals via Art-Net, which is transmitting multiple universes of DMX down Cat5 to a switch that branches out to each crystal piece. The end result is that the video [walls] and the crystals receive all that communication. It’s a big network — almost like a big tree branch.”
CREW
Designer/Programmer: Vello Virkhaus/V Squared Labs
Designer: Amanda Hamilton/V Squared Labs
Set Builder: Stefano Novelli
Production Manager: Chris Villanueva
Lighting Programmer/LD: Aron Altmark
Lighting Director: Pete Smith
Video Director: Max Chang/V Squared Labs
LED Tech: Tim Holland
System Programmer: Evan Pierre
Animator: Jesse Nikette
Rigging Safety Manager: Charlie Weiner/ LMG Touring
LMG Reps: Craig Mitchell, LMG Touring National Sales Manager; Jimmy Russo,LMG Touring Account Executive
GEAR
2 grandMA2 full size consoles (one backup)
12 Clay Paky Sharpys
6 Martin MAC 101s
7 Color Kinetics ColorBlaze 72 LED battens
5 Martin Atomic 3000 strobes
2 DF-50 hazers
1 Upstage 24’x12’ main LED wall (120 FLED F-11 11mm LED tiles)
2 8’x5’ L-R LED walls (each w/12 FLED F-11 LED tiles)
1 20’x8’ LED wall for DJ booth (center, w/40 FLED F-11 LED Tiles)
1 L-ML power distro unit
4 Socapex cable case w/ breakouts
24 20A/208V circuits per Socapex
1 LED touring frame
2 LED splitters
1 Folsom ImagePRO HD converter/scaler
