When Kevin Mitchell of Sugar Society booked the legendary Rabbit in the Moon at Amos’ Southend, his ace up his sleeve was Jack Kelly of Eye Dialogue, who had four years of experience doing shows at the Charlotte, NC music hall. He handed Kelly the tour rider and asked if he could light it for $4,000.
Rabbit in the Moon shows are legendary. If you’ve never witnessed one of their events then you have no idea what a show with great visuals, lasers, giant beach balls with people in them, and a million beams looks like.
“I never imagined that one day I would be the designer for their show,” Kelly mused.
But it would not be easy. The rider was very detailed with CAD drawings and an equipment list that exceeded the budget and size of the stage. There were truss towers, moving lights, strobes, blinders, LED up lights, down lights, five LCD TVs, and three projector screens, all covering a 40- by 30-foot stage.
“My brain went into overload,” Kelly said later on. Since the stage in the club was only 17 feet wide and the ceiling is lower than the lighting plot specified, Kelly thought, “I have to really rack my brain for this one.”
Mitchell and Kelly have worked countless events together, creating some of Charlotte’s most memorable parties. Still, it took some time for Kelly to wrap his mind around the budget, the stage, and the rider. Welcome to the club touring circuit.
“I don’t know if any music venue or night club can completely satisfy a rider,” Kelly said. Like a lot like of business plans, riders can look good on paper. But when it comes down to realizing them, they have to be flexible or they will fail. “Just like drawing a map based on the descriptions of explorers, the real landscape seldom looks like the dreamscape of a touring rider,” Kelly added.
Though the rider for Rabbit in the Moon included a large stage plot, massive towers, and myriad fixtures, it supplied the key to satisfying the band’s artistic goals, including important information about the artistic direction for layering, elevations, and effects. With this in mind, Kelly’s approach was to “scale the performer’s vision with a little imagination, creating a dynamic performance on any stage.”
“Typically, bands are not trying to establish a dictatorship,” Kelly said. “Most bands understand that every space is different and they want help from those who are familiar with a space. However, they are understandably upset if their rider and their vision are completely ignored.” His job as the lighting and video designer and supplier, he said, was to try to understand the purpose of the stage design and create a design with the same energy in the venue, all the while honoring the promoter’s budget. It was a tall order.
“The first step was to squeeze everything into a 10- by 17-foot picture frame,” said Kelly. “Lots of lights on a big stage is easy; power-packed shows on a small stage is not.” He designed the projection using two custom 5.4- by 4-foot projector screens framed in “goalie post” trussing on each side of a stage riser. Behind the riser was a 6- by 8-foot fast fold screen. The smaller screens were rear projected and the upstage screen was front projected. All together there was 24 linear feet of video projection surfaces. Although the whole stage set could only be viewed from the middle of the room, the expansive set upstage created a nice visual from all angles.
In order to stay within his budget, Kelly had to use a smaller projector and work to control the ambient light on the stage and in the room. “In a dark room,” he said, “a 2000 lumen projector can look amazing.” Part of keeping the environment lit correctly meant having to avoid putting light directly on the screens and keeping the stage illuminance under tight control. “Three 5000-lumen projectors would have taken most of the budget before we even started,” Kelly said. “However, with the right lighting, three 2000-lumens projectors pulled off one of the biggest visual presentations in Charlotte this year.”
To complete the set and to conveniently mask all of the cables, two 42-inch monitors were placed in front of David Christopher, the keyboard and digital effects player. Besides hiding the cables, the LCD monitors also hid the stands and provided another layer of visuals.
“I love using prime numbers with screens,” Kelly said. “The five-screen visual packed onto the stage created a very balanced, yet focused look. A single centered screen followed by two pairs of screens shrinking in size as they move towards the floor subconsciously distorts depth perception and keeps the eye traveling up and down stage.”
The audience blinders that were specified in the rider were both out of budget and too big for the stage. So Kelly subbed Color Kinetics ColorCast 14s, using four of the LED fixtures on each truss leg. The units proved to be ideal for a stage of this size. Kelly used them to build anticipation with color changing flashes, strobing, and sweeps through a range of colors, until front man Bunny (Steve Eachon) took the stage.
To light the moon bunny, two 250-watt Elation moving head fixtures followed him wherever he ventured. To help make the task a bit easier, an 8’x8’ platform was used for “Bunny control,” limited his movements to a small area. For the general stage wash, six color-changing PARs were used to front light the stage and six color-changing PARs were used to up light the performance platform. With the platform to help control the roaming bunny, Kelly could place more fixtures on the floor, which were obscured by a 12-inch lip running the length of the stage. The placement was ideal, providing nearly 360° of light and allowing Kelly to create interesting shadows and up lighting when called upon. Eight more ColorCast fixtures were placed behind the truss to backlight Christopher.
That’s not all that was lighting Christopher. “Unfortunately, he had a projector in his face the entire night,” said Kelly. “Thankfully, he’s a seasoned performer and graciously accepted this fate.”
Because of the limited ceiling height, using the automated lights was a bit of a challenge. “In order to create crowd energy, the lights have to sweep through the air, especially at an electronic event,” said Kelly. However, the audio speakers and conventional lights in Amos’ will block the light from any fixtures rigged on stage six feet high or higher, which precludes projecting above the crowd. But Kelly had a fix. “By putting Bunny on the platform, we were able to use the space on the floor around him for both the LEDs and scanners,” he said. The moving mirror fixtures were placed on the floor around Bunny, and the beams could either scan Bunny or the crowd. Four more scanners were set six feet off the ground and four more were inverted on the truss to create cross beams with the floor scans. “Rays of light seemed to come from every corner of the stage,” Kelly said.
For the final touches, Kelly used a solid-state laser, haze, fire, glow tubes, hand held lasers, cryo systems and “lots of fun interactive effects.” The show was programmed with transparent cues so colors, positions, and effects could be piled on and changed on the fly.
Due to the complexity of the show, there were two operators on two lighting consoles; one for the moving lights and one for the LEDs. A Clear-Com system was used to communicate with the VJ, who called the lighting cues. “Although this was my first time working with Rabbit in the Moon,” Kelly tells, “their communication was clear and allowed for creative interpretation. After three intense hours of the best live show I have ever seen, I have never been prouder of my team and the finished product.”
The gig validated Kelly’s approach to adopting the tour rider for the club circuit. Even with the substitutions and budget cutting, the band and promoter were ecstatic with the results. For Kelly and crew, it was exhausting, if rewarding, work.
“I crawled into bed that night,” Kelly recalls, “and dreamed of carrots and rocket ships.”
