Projection and Video sere Integral to the Flexible and Kinetic Design of the Bad Boy Family Reunion Shows
Two nights that were 20 years in the making became part of Hip-Hop music history with Sean “Puff Daddy” Combs’ Bad Boy Family Reunion concerts at Brooklyn’s Barclays Center.
Combs took the stage with many of the stars of his Bad Boy Records label, including Lil’ Kim, Mase, Faith Evans, Mario Winans, 112, Total, Carl Thomas, French Montana, Jay-Z, Mary J. Blige, Nas, and Rick Ross. The three hour shows were scheduled as also a birthday tribute to Christopher “Notorious B.I.G.” Wallace, who would have been 44 on May 21. Though the tickets sold out in minutes, for production designer Alex Reardon and the entire creative production team, it was the fruition of “three months’ work; 13 design revisions; and three weeks of rehearsals.”
With multiple headliner performers, additional special guests, 10 dancers, an eight-piece band and a set list of over 80 songs, Reardon knew his stage and lighting designs needed to be flexible, dynamic, and still be able to unify all the performances into the Bad Boy environment as envisioned by Combs and the show’s creative director, Laurieann Gibson. “If you want something that can be everything, that something has to be nothing,” describes Reardon. “It should look as just pretty much a flat set with nothing on it that then can reconfigure into anything. That was where I started. I just wanted to give the director the architecture that is flexible enough that she felt unimpeded. I knew Laurieann really wanted this to be unlike any other show; she wanted it to be theatrical.”
Reardon met with Combs to discuss the Bad Boy environment that he envisioned for the show that he and his artists were to inhabit on the stage. “I had Sean give me, what I call, a ‘tsunami’ of ideas that he had in his mind so I could bring those looks into the design. I’m not an advocate of scale being necessarily a good design. I think it’s about being appropriate to the project,” notes Reardon. “A phrase I use a lot is something I learned from my dad, who is an architect. ‘The function of a designer is to be as creative as any fine artist, within somebody else’s specification.’ So when you’re getting a specification from an artist that says, you know, this is my legacy, this is my act, this is me, that speaks for a sense of scale. This isn’t going to be your, sort of, avant-garde theatre, one-night happening. He wanted The Dark Knight, Transformers; this was the visual language we discussed.”
Staging and Automation
The stage and automation, which was provided by SGPS ShowRig, is 60 feet wide, 16 feet deep and six feet high for most of the stage. The rear of the main stage is eight feet high to accommodate nine triple-mast elevators, which were all independently controllable and can move in rows of three, or individually from below the deck to a maximum of 14 feet. The independent elevators allowed Reardon and the creative team to have tiered platforms for dancers or to reveal a performer. There’s a toaster downstage center that was used for gentle deployment rather than as a toaster. This was possible since SGPS uses servo controls with a computer rather than pneumatics or hydraulic controls. The company builds them to work as either an elevator to move as fast (or as slow) as you want, or be a toaster. This unit can move from one foot off the floor to six feet high in anywhere from .6 seconds to 11 minutes. There are two ramps on stage left and right that rise up to eight feet to allow for emergency egress out of the pit area. There is a U-shaped thrust to the stage with a B-stage out in front that contains an eight-foot-by-eight-foot scissor lift that can go up to 18 feet high. SGPS used a Tait Navigator automation system to control the automation and motion control for the stage lifts as well as the lighting pods, roll drops, Kabuki, and snifters used throughout the production. At the back of the stage, Reardon went with a 7mm ROE Visual LED screen that was supplied by Screenworks. It measures 38 by 60 feet.
Soft Goods
Working with the automation from SGPS ShowRig, Atomic provided the custom soft goods for the stage. Starting at the downstage and working upstage, Reardon had a full cross-stage, bi-parting black velour drape for a walk-in look. That opened to reveal an off-white silk, which was on a Kabuki release system with a snifter to pull it away. A pre-show movie played on this silk drop. Moving upstage, between the downstage and mid-stage pods, there was a 60-by-44-foot sharkstooth scrim for front projections, which gave Reardon the ability to soften the look of a performer on a lift. This scrim also had a Kabuki release mechanism. Between the mid and upstage pods, there were three fast roll drops (two measuring 10 by 40 feet, WxH, and one at 20 by 40 feet). These were all off-white and designed for front projecting onto the material. Then, at the back of the stage, was another full, cross-stage black velour drape and a single white drape for front projection; all right in front of the LED screen. The white drape was used at times to soften and diffuse the LED video wall.
Having incorporated movement and transformation into the stage elements Reardon looked to bring versatility to the lighting rig as well. “There are over 80 songs in the set list,” he says. “Which, I must admit, I did look at with some trepidation, but it came down to trying not to overly cue each song. If you think big and bold, and do big changes on the big hits, rather than infinite sub-cues, you will have something different happening throughout the show. Lighting pods let me do that, being able to move into so many different positions. I just think if you start with a musical base, and you just listen, a design solution will present itself. I listened to the music and said, ‘Okay, this is a very aggressive song, let’s bring all the pods in flat at eight feet and just compress the vision so that we mimic the musical intensity.’”
Reardon continues, “With this rig, it is more about a combination of art, architecture, and kinetic sculpture. There has to be a purpose for a move, not just, ‘Oh now a new song, give me a new position.’ I’m trying to give the main performers, who may all have four or five songs each, pretty much their own look with the design. We have been able to really shape the Masculine vs. Feminine; the subtlety; the bombastic, thanks to the lovely 21st century production toys, we can actually achieve that. The hardware and software today really enables us to create a sense of theatre.”
Lighting
To keep the flexibility that he had with the stage going throughout the lighting system, as Reardon stated, he designed lighting pods that could help re-shape the space and create dynamic looks with kinetic movement. Reardon’s plot includes 15 lighting pods, each a square shape and measuring 10 feet per side, and each loaded with nine Philips Vari-Lite VL3000 Spots and two Clay Paky Stormy strobes. The perimeter of each pod is also lined with 72-inch Philips Color Kinetics ColorBlaze strips on each side. PRG, which provided the entire lighting package, fashioned custom end plates to build the truss into pods. The heavy steel end plates allowed for the motors to be shackled into the pods.
“I don’t really have very many wash fixtures in the rig,” says Reardon. “I use the LED battens on max to give me a big soft flood of light. The nice thing is the ColorBlazes actually have a bit of a beam to them, for about four feet, and then they turn into a big wash light. So if I bring the pods down and flat, we can use that non-wash beam to box people in; but if I take the pods out, I then have a big soft wash. There are two side trusses per side of stage, one high and one low. Those trusses each have five PRG Bad Boys per, because they’ve get that great punch. I can do a full cross-stage wash from pretty much the dasher line. Those Bad Boys off-stage with the VL3K’s onstage is a good combination; obviously they’re much brighter than VL3K’s but they give me a good wash for dances.
“Also,” he continues, “I have [PRG] Best Boys, which we’re using on the trusses that shine straight down onto the U-shaped thrust as well as a 10-by-10-foot box of them over the B-stage. Again, those are good for the throw and color, and a favorite toy of mine; I love Best Boys and Bad Boys.” On the downstage edge of the main stage, Reardon is using 10 GLP impression X4 Bar 20’s, “which I very much like,” adds the designer. “I saw them at LDI and thought that they looked nice. They do that MR16 outline thing very nicely. But also if pointed out you get fantastic beams, and they’re bright as all get-out.”
Just upstage of the LED screen, Reardon placed seven PRG Bad Boys and five Clay Paky RGB Stormy strobes. At the end of the ego ramps on either side of the stage, he went with two VL2500 Washes for a really strong side cross wash.
“Puffy wanted the whole stage to glow, so it’s all lined with LED tape,” explains Reardon. “I actually did two channels of the LED tape, because if you just have the tape pointing up, the audience on the floor doesn’t see it, and if you just use the off-stage channel in your regular deck, the people upstairs don’t see it. So we put LED tape in the channel and routed out the Marley putting tape on the perimeter as well, so when the stage glows, it really glows.”
Lighting control was via a main and a backup grandMA2 console running over a PRG Series 400 Data Distribution Network System. Lighting director Joe Cabrera handled programming and operating the lighting for the bulk of the show, and lighting director Kathy Beer ran the B-stage keylight and called the followspots and automation cues for the show.
Projection and Video
With projection and video integral to the production design and the dynamically changing visual environment, Reardon worked closely with the content creator for the show, Roger Staub, from Infect Productions. During the rehearsal process, at Rock Lititz, Staub and his team set up a content studio on site so they could work side by side with Reardon. “We wanted to see what Alex is doing from his side,” states Staub. “[To] see the different looks he was building, especially for the lighting, for each song, so we could react quickly and adjust the content if necessary to whatever screen situation or lighting rig situation we were facing. This is the second time I’ve worked with Alex now and, style-wise, I think we’re on the same track, which makes it easy to talk the same language.”
Like Reardon, Staub’s content had to reflect the overall creative vision, but still offer individual performers some unique aspects. “I also worked very closely with Laurieann and Puff Daddy regarding the looks and the vision he had for the visuals. Obviously, with a set list of 80-90 possible songs, we couldn’t create original content for all of them. We did create original content and locked in 30 songs. Overall, though, we had to find a balance between lighting looks, image looks, and songs with original content. That was the interesting part of it; ‘how do we treat these different sections of artists in a way that are different, but somehow still maintain the visions of Laurieann and Puff?’ We wanted to keep the theatrical, bold look of the show and the umbrella of the Dark Knight theme; the Bad Boy look. We channeled everything through that and made sure that the quality of each section, of each visual was what he and Laurieann were expecting.”
In addition to the 38-by-60-foot 7mm LED wall upstage, Reardon had Screenworks supply nine Barco HDF-W30K projectors to project onto the scrims and roll drops that he had at various depths on the stage. Eric Marchwinski from Earlybird Visual served as media systems technical director and was tasked with the technical implementation of the media playback system, as well as overseeing the layout of the projection system and the projectors. He and his media server/projection team included media server programmer Zach Peletz and video systems engineer/content manager Mitch Lathrop. Marchwinski called upon VER to supply the d3 Technologies d3 media servers, engineering support, and the MA Lighting grandMA2 consoles for playback and control.
They engineered a system that could deal with the varying Z-depths with different drops at different distances from the projectors by using the d3 media server system to handle all of the alignment, as the d3 knew exactly where each screen was in relation to the projector. “The way the system was engineered, and the capabilities the system had, are really awesome,” says Marchwinski. “We could drop in any drape at any time. We have nine 30K’s, all overlaid on each other. Since we were feeding the projectors discrete feeds through d3, we had nine outputs to the projectors, as opposed to one or two outputs. The projectionists just needed to aim and focus the projectors. They didn’t need to worry about converging them, because the d3 knows where the projectors are, knows where the set geometry is, and is able to output to each projector accordingly. This allowed for the work flow of, ‘We want to project up here,’ or ‘We want to project down there.’ We can change all of that on the fly.”
Marchwinski had François David of Pixel Relief handle the projection studies. “We worked with François on making sure our system was well designed physically. His knowledge about projectors is incredible. We were about 230 feet back from the surfaces, which allowed us to have a tighter lens, giving us brighter output as well as a deeper depth of field. The focal depth was as deep as the stage, which allowed us to not have to adjust focus on the projectors. As far as re-converging the projectors on the different drops, d3 handled that all internally.
“Zach is one of the best projection mapping d3 guys in New York, for sure, and Mitch is by far one of the best content management and systems engineers I’ve worked with,” Marchwinski continues. “The sheer scale of the project, as far as the amount of songs, was astronomical. We landed at 84, or so in total. From a content management perspective, that is something I have never encountered. Mitch put together a system based around a shared spreadsheet document online. We had multiple sheets for multiple departments from the music director, to lighting, to automation, to us. That managed the entire show flow, in looking at how we’re going to approach 80 to 90 songs worth of data and cues efficiently.”
The Bad Boy Family Reunion Tour, with a modified version of the Brooklyn lineup — sans Jay Z and Mary J. Blige, but with the Lox and Carl Thomas — will hit the road for 25 dates beginning Aug. 25 in Columbus, OH and wrapping Oct. 8 in Oakland, CA.
Bad Boy Family Reunion
Crew
Creative Team:
- Creative Director: Laurieann Gibson
- Production and Lighting Designer: Alex Reardon, Wildwood Creative Productions
- Content Creation: Roger Staub, Infect Productions
- Production Manager: Randy Buzzelli
- Lighting Directors: Joe Cabrera and Kathy Beer
- Media Server Technical Director: Eric Marchwinski, Earlybird Visual
- Projection Studies: Francois David, Pixel Relief
- Video Director: Steve Fatone
Content Creation Team:
- Video Content: Infect Productions
- Creative Director: Roger Staub
- CG-Artist and Lead Art Director: G M D THREE
- CG-Artist, Motion Graphic Designer: Leon Baisden
- Producer: Anna Lin
- Motion Graphic Designer: Sophie Lee
- Editors: Erik van der Wilden and Life Garland
Production Companies:
- Video: Screenworks (video gear and crew); VER (media servers, control and crew)
- Lighting: PRG
- Sets/Motion Control: SGPS/ShowRig (Justin Summers)
- Soft Goods: Atomic (Conway Allison)
Screenworks Video Crew:
- Video Engineer: Coach
- Projectionist: Chris Small
- Projectionist/Camera Operators: Dave Anderson, Patrick Dolan
- LED Techs/Camera Operators: Jonathan Richmond, Noel Gonzalez
- Screenworks Director of Concert Touring: Randy Mayer
VER Media Server Crew:
- Media Server Programmer/Operator: Zach Peletz
- Video Systems Engineer/Content Management: Mitch Lathrop
PRG Lighting Crew:
- Crew Chief: Ian Tucker
- Lighting Crew: Anthony Ciampa, Scott Naef, Russell Lyons, and Harry O’Neill
- PRG Project Manager: Dan Jackson
- PRG Account Executive: Julian Edwards
Gear
Screenworks Video Gear:
- 9 Barco HDF-W30K HD Projectors
- 9 DVI Fiber Kits and projector looms
- 1 X-7b 7mm LED video wall (36’x60’)
- 4 Barco HDX-W20 Flex 20K HD Projectors
- 2 Rear projection screens w/frames (12’x21’)
- 2 DVI Fiber Kits and projector looms
- 1 Ross 2ME HD switcher w/multi viewer
- 1 Monitoring rack
- 5 AJA hard drives (record and playback)
- 4 Sony HXC-100 HD broadcast cameras
- 2 Canon 72×1 long lens
- 3 Panasonic HD robo cameras w/ controller
- 4 HD Camera CCUs (for engineering rack)
- 1 16×16 Lightware DVI router
VER Control/Media Servers:
- 2 grandMA 2 consoles
- 1 d3 Technologies media server system
PRG Lighting Equipment:2 MA Lighting grandMA2 Full consoles
- 4 MA Lighting grandMA NPUs
- 36 PRG Bad Boy Spot luminaires
- 5 PRG Bad Boy followspot controller kits
- 25 PRG Best Boy HP spot luminaires
- 79 Vari*Lite VL3000 Spots
- 69 Vari*Lite VL3000Q Spots
- 34 Vari*Lite VL3500 Washes
- 1 PRG Virtuoso Node Plus
- 6 PRG Series 400 power and data distribution racks
- 72 Color Kinetics ColorBlast CB12 TRX RGBAW LED units
- 65 Color Kinetics ColorBlaze 72 RGBW LED strips
- 26 High End Systems Showguns
- 18 GLP impression X4 LED fixtures
- 14 GLP impression X4 Bar 20 LED fixtures
- 46 Clay Paky Stormy RGBW LED strobes
- 26 Chauvet Nexus 4×4 RGB LED fixtures
- 45 Tyler LowPro Truss (black, 14”x24”x10’)
- 5 PRG BAT Truss (black, 15”x24”x10’)
- 18 PRG BAT Truss (black, 15”x30”x8’)
- 4 PRG BAT Truss adjustable gates
- 1 Lot PRG custom gates for truss lighting pods
- 8 Reel EFX DF-50 Diffusion hazers
- 6 LeMaitre G-300 Mk-II fog machines
Atomic Soft Goods:
- 1 Black velour drape (60’x44’)
- 1 Kabuki w/ Snifter (60’x44’)
- 1 Roll Type Snifter,
- 1 Double Kabuki scrim
- 3 Roll Drops (2 at 10’x40’; 1 at 20’x40’)
- 1 Upstage Wipe (60’x38’)
For more Bad Boy Family Reunion photos by Todd Kaplan, go to www.plsn.me/plsn-badboy-2016
