As this issue went to press, Radiohead was reeling from the partial stage collapse on June 16 at Downsview Field in Toronto, which killed crew member Scott Johnson, injured three others and destroyed many of the lighting elements discussed in this Production Profile. In a statement, the band noted that, along with “the grief and shock ensuing from this terrible accident,” there were “practical considerations to deal with…The collapse also destroyed the light show; this show was unique and will take many weeks to replace.”
The band also announced that they would need to postpone at least seven shows that had been scheduled in Europe from June 30 (in Rome) through July 9 (in Switzerland). The tour was expected to resume with a rebuilt lighting and video system on July 10 in the south of France. —ed.
Radiohead and visual designer/director Andi Watson have long been known for their commitment to the environment, so when Watson had the idea of expanding upon a “bottle wall” idea he had previously tried for Jason Mraz, he and production manager Richard Young made sure the bottles they used were 100 percent recyclable.
“I spent a long time in supermarkets looking at water bottles, and I’m sure I got some strange looks because of it,” Watson says.
His scrutiny wasn’t just limited to the recyclable symbol on the packaging, but to the ability of the many thousands of containers to work together to produce a multi-dimensional mass of refracted light from adjacent LED fixtures.
“Because they are transparent and they have a lens-like front with the edges, you get very three-dimensional effects, so [the more] you move off-axis, the more it starts to blur, and whatever content you add, it can merge into itself.”
The massive bottle wall, set aglow by the LED fixtures (the gear list includes 880 Versa Tubes along with iPix BB4s, BB7s and PixelSmart LEDs) is the latest tweak in the evolving design concept Watson has created, moving Radiohead’s stage show further away from traditional rock ‘n’ roll beam effects and more toward an immersive, video-enhanced performance environment.
“Having worked with the band for so many years, when I go into a new design for a new tour, I don’t really try to top myself; it’s more about creating an environment for them than a spectacle,” Watson says.
“The last tour was very well-received,” Watson adds. “It was about energy, efficiency and using low power sources, and I was incredibly happy with it. LED hasn’t progressed massively really in the past few years; there wasn’t an enormous difference I could make.
“So what I decided to do was rather than go with a whole new system, I would concentrate on being able to recycle and reuse and reinvent what we already had,” Watson continues. “Since the band purchased the equipment we had on the last tour, I thought, why not reuse it in a different way, which is how the bottle wall came about.”
Another factor shaping the set and lighting design, Watson notes, is the band’s return to indoor arenas along with outdoor festivals.
Although the band trusts his judgment — “I have a strong visual language the band understands, and it helps that they like what I do, so they do sort of leave me to get on with it” — Watson takes the time to make sure the band has a good look at his visual ideas in the early stages of gestation.
For the bottle wall idea, he went so far as to build a 7-by-7-foot mock-up of the wall so they could get a first-hand look at “how the light works with it.” More typically, he’ll simply show them a pre-viz version of how the stage will appear — but even there, he’s prepared to show them how it looks from multiple points of view.
“I model all my designs in a 3D modeling package, so every design I do is actually built as a 3D model and all my diagrams and drawings are done from that model, so I basically put 15 to 20 different combinations and positions for the screens and rendered them from different views.
“Also, so the band could see the curves of the Versa Tubes upstage and the curves of the different screens and front truss. I like to show them the different audience perspectives.
“It’s important to me that everyone, no matter where they view it gets s good show out of it, a good experience of a live show. I try to avoid things that only look good from the front view. Which is why the upstage Versa wall and bottles are curved, so everyone gets the same kind of effects, at whatever angle.”
As might be expected, the Radiohead lighting rig still veers sharply away from traditional energy-gobbling pods of PAR cans and cyc lights.
“For fixtures, I’ve got, on the upstage wall, 880 Versa Tubes, BB7 LEDs, some new custom Thomas LED followspots, which [have] a warm/cold feeling, along with some Thomas PixelSmart LEDs with the beam shaping effects — the light doesn’t move, but the beam does, and so on,” Watson says.
Along with the bottle wall, moving video elements are an eye-catching feature of the current Radiohead tour. There are a dozen “puppet” video screens, each comprised of a 3-by-3-foot square of CT Touring’s Flyer 12 LED panels.
“We use the video as more of a light source,” Watson says. “I originally wanted to have no lights at all and just have video. I was going to use small video sections as lights and have them scattered about. But the problem is the video processing — all the video panels we could find that were really usable, you had like a minimum of 1.5 meters between panels, between sections. Which, for our shows, would have been fine, we could have run cables and processors under the stage. But when you do festivals like Coachella and the like, it would have been impossible, so we have some lights, but next time…. it’s something we’ve been working towards for a long time.”
With a large and evolving set list — “we have 94 songs so far, and more will be added to the set list as the tour goes on, as no two shows are the same,” Watson has made the move from a grandMA console to the grandMA2. “I started on the MA1 but moved to the MA2 with so many songs. It was a bit of a steep learning curve, but it all worked out.
“I do want to give a cheer to my fantastic team, the production crew and everyone else on this tour,” Watson adds.
CREW
Visual Designer & Director: Andi Watson
Lighting Crew Chief: Andy Beller
Lighting Techs: Travis Robinson, Jake Sullivan, Ian Lomas
Video Techs: Ed Jackson, Rob Brewer
Network Video Distribution/IT: Katie Friesema
Networking Consultant: Jack Banks
Production Manager: Richard Young
Production Coordinator: Jil Aram
Tour Manager: Peter Yozell
Stage Manager: Brian Wares
Cameras & Servers: Blaine Dracup
Automation: Richard Kent, Krystof Hansbury
Riggers: Jules Grommers, Makoa Kahanamoku
Set Carpenter: Stuart Simms
Production Companies:
Lighting Co: Upstaging Inc. (U.S.); Neg Earth (Europe)
Trucking Co: Upstaging Inc. (U.S.), McGuinness (Europe)
Video Acquisition/Manipulation Co: Scenographic Ltd
Video Screen/Display Co: Creative Technology
Bottle Wall Assembly & Fabrication: James Thomas Engineering Ltd.
Lighting Gear
64 iPix BB4 LED Fixtures
6 Custom Thomas LED Skyline Followbeams
32 Thomas PixelSmart LED fixtures
30 iPix BB7 LED fixtures
880 Barco Versa Tube HD 1m LED fixtures
24 Martin MAC 101 RGB LED fixtures
8 Martin MAC 101 CT LED fixtures
15 Pulsar ChromaFlood LED fixtures
1 Custom bottle wall
1 Kabuki system
4 Le Maitre Stadium Hazers
4 Haze Base base hazers
Video Gear
1 Front Header Screen w/CT Flyer 12 LED (28’ x 3’)
12 Puppet Video Screens w/CT Flyer 12 LED (3’ x 3’)
9 Sony H700 RPTZ cameras
5 Sony RM-BR300 base control stations
15 Fixed cameras
4 Catalyst media servers
1 AJA/BlackMagic Design video processing/distribution server
1 Custom AutoDesk video engine
Online Extras: To see more Radiohead images by Steve Jennings, go to http://plsn.me/radioheadextras.
