Nine Inch Nails’ 2013 Tension tour, in support of NIN’s Hesitation Marks album, fuses artistry with technology and lighting with video. Frontman Trent Reznor teamed once again with art director Rob Sheridan and production designer/LD LeRoy Bennett for another tour de force production.
Bennett, who has been working with Reznor for more than 15 years, likens the imagery to something you might see in an art installation. His goal, as always, is to “make it all work as one piece” with the flow of the music. “Trent’s music is so diverse — it’ll go from full-on rock music to these beautiful landscapes; very dark landscapes at times; very emotional, deep music. You have to be able to create very intimate moments and then huge moments; expand and contract.”
Compression and Release
As with previous tours, the visuals start off with “this intense, compressed feeling,” then “expand and explode out. That’s basically the way the show is developed musically, too. For the most part, it stays compressed, then expands, and then it does come down a bit. But it’s not as claustrophobic.”
Bennett has 19 different objects, including light pods, video walls and moving light trusses that move at varying rates of speed. Upstaging and PRG Nocturne provided lighting and video gear for the tour. The rig’s cutting-edge gear including Ayrton MagicPanel 602 fixtures (distributed in the U.S. by Morpheus Lights) and PRG Nocturne’s V-Thru transparent LED panels. All Access Staging & Production built the pods and staging for the show. Ampco Flashlight Rental supplied the CyberMotion automation system along with support from CyberMotion North-America.
The automation lets Bennett synch and morph the lighting and video gear with the music. He creates a lighting/video ceiling with 14 movable pods, each with nine MagicPanel 602 luminaires in a 3×3 arrangement. Each of these pods is connected to three XLNT Advance Technologies’ CyberHoists that allows a full 45° of pitch and rotation in all directions. The individual pods can be lowered from the 55-foot-high grid to just above the musician’s heads for a compressed letterbox effect, moving during blackouts and lit moments.
A packed upstage wall of lights include Clay Paky Sharpys, Martin Professional Mac Auras and SGM X-5 strobes, and Bennett also loads up on Vari*Lite fixtures behind the wall and on the sides, with automated L-R truss that can “run up and downstage with Sharpys on them,” Bennett says. “There are a lot of lights on this show,” he says. The moving side truss is also linked to the CyberMotion system, allowing the Sharpys to move in conjunction with the articulation of the MagicPanel pods, and there are Sharpy Wash fixtures across the front of the stage.
A “Ceiling of Squares”
For the movable “ceiling,” Bennett used the MagicPanels’ 36 15W RGBW LEDs to achieve chunky beams of light and also for low-res video imagery. They also can continuously rotate on the pan and tilt axes. “They were an element that was a very last minute add,” he says, noting the advantages of the moving squares over the original “ceiling of strobes” design. “They can look like tiny, small spots at times, or a big square wash, or a low-res video element.”
Jason Baeri, who programmed the lighting for the Tension tour, noted that the tour rig is “not a rig you get bored with; the pods are always moving and changing positions. Every single song becomes a new challenge to work with as the angles and heights change; from grid height to some songs where the guys look like they are wearing the pods as hats.” He also credited the MagicPanels for their light quality and color mixing. “It’s a really cool unit.”
The lighting is controlled via two MA Lighting grandMA2s with 62 universes of control, also provided by Upstaging. “We have eight NPUs and then 14 of the four-port nodes upstage,” says Baeri. “We can get three MagicPanels per one universe, so that is a total of 42 universes of MagicPanels in the air.” Brian Jenkins is the lighting director out on the tour.
Lighting/Video Fusion
The Tension tour visuals have no clear demarcation of what’s lighting and what’s video; the two elements blend for a cohesive visual whole. “There’s too much of a large visual statement on every single song to not have them be directly related,” says Baeri, noting the use of the MagicPanels as a case in point.
Although Baeri controlled the MagicPanels as moving lights for much of the show, video programmer Loren Barton could also feed video to the units. “There is definitely a lot of integration where lighting and video work together especially since we are pixel-mapping the MagicPanels,” says Barton. “It meant that we had to stay coordinated, since one change on either side had a ripple effect on everything.”
As for his role on the creative team, Barton notes that “Rob Sheridan and Trent focus on the video while Roy focused more on the lighting side. I worked with Rob, and then we would work with lighting to balance prominence between the lighting and the video.” Both Montreal-based Moment Factory and art director Sheridan created content for the production.
On the technical side, Barton and Baeri created an Art-Net merge to handle the flow of data. “We did everything ultimately 5-pin out of the MA2 nodes and added video input from the Hippo straight into the console,” states Barton. “The console is what actually does the Art-Net merge between pan and tilt and the other controls that Jason adds. Then it’s a mix between lighting sending RGB values or the Hippo sending values for the video elements.
“Figuring out the Art-Net merge was definitely an interesting challenge for Jason and myself,” Barton adds. “Figuring out how many universes it could handle, and breaking up the Hippo pixel-mapper into three discrete engines so that it would actually output full frames of Art-Net.”
“From the gear-head side, for me, the Art-Net merge is the cool thing on this,” says Baeri. “The amount of data going in to deal with the MagicPanels is amazing; that’s 4,500-odd fixtures when you get down to the pixels. 4,500 pixels that we’re using as fixtures. Roy would give me a shape, and the panels were like a Lite-Brite hanging there; we could pick out individual cells to use for the shape. The MA2 console caps at 10,000 groups, and we had like 7,500 to deal with it all.”
Video Transparency
Along with a seamless integration of lighting and video effects, Bennett, Reznor and Sheridan sought video screens with enough transparency so that they could be in front of the band and the audience wouldn’t be sure there is anything there until suddenly video moves in front of the musicians.
“There have been a whole slew of low-res, what we call transparent screens — that aren’t really transparent; there’s a lot of physical structure to them,” says Bennett. “I was finding it very difficult to find the actual medium to do this properly. So the kind folks at [PRG] Nocturne made a new screen for me; and in less than two months. The V-Thru screen that’s out on NIN right now is the only one in the world, and is a pretty amazing screen. It’s extremely transparent.”
The two scrim-like screens — one that can fly in downstage and another one at midstage, in front of the drum riser — are the brand new PRG Nocturne V-Thru walls. Both of the 28mm V-Thru screens, which are slightly curved, measure 54 by 13.25 feet (WxH). Upstage just in front of the massive back wall of lights is a flat high-resolution PRG Nocturne V-9 LED wall that measures 70 by 16.25 feet (WxH).
Ron Proesel, technical designer for PRG Nocturne, came up with the new 28mm LED screen design in response to Bennett’s request. It works by housing the power and data cabling inside channels cut into the vertical support rails. In addition, the rails are six-feet apart. Pairing the wider panel design with a 28mm LED placement gives the panel a 66 percent transparency for true scrim-like effects.
Barton calls the V-Thru screens as “amazing — bright, rigid, and easily tourable” and credits Proesel for the quick turn-around. “He started designing those in June and delivered the final product in August/early September.”
“The bezel on the V-Thru screen is almost non-existent,” adds Baeri, adding that the screen “really disappears when you want it to. For the first 45 minutes, the audience is just watching and thinking, ‘what the hell is happening’ because of the illusion of the visuals. Then we pull the plug and show them everything that is going on — they can see the screens, the chain motors, the pod structures. And that becomes another great ‘in your face’ moment in the show.”
Collaborating with Trent Reznor is not for the faint of heart — he’s described by many as a tough taskmaster who knows exactly what’s going on with every aspect of his production. But Bennett describes his work with the artist as “one of my favorite things — mostly because of how far I can push things and he’s willing to go there with me. He understands what the technology I am using is; he takes the time to learn what it is, which is rare. A lot of artists that I work with are interested, but not to the extent that he is; he’s such a tech-head. It’s always a very exciting journey; it’s a very intense and very emotional journey at times to get there in the end. You just have to keep moving forward and looking to what it’s going to be and how to get there. It takes nerves of steel; you trust in what you are all doing and where you are going together.”
