The Highly Defined Bon Jovi Tour

Lighting director Pat Brannon has been with Bon Jovi in one capacity or another longer than many of his colleagues have been in the entertainment business. But his current position on the tour is now in its sixth year.

“I started with the band in ’88. I was brought in by the LD at the time and had responsibility of over 200 Color Mags,” Bannon says. “From there, I was asked to be the lighting director in ‘89 and returned on the next tour as crew chief and computer motor operator and programmer. Before 1995, I was the moving light operator and programmer. So in reality, I have been with the band for 18 years.

“In Aug. 2005, I started communicating with Artfag, the production design company that has designed Bon Jovi since 2000. Doug ‘Spike’ Brant and I started going over ideas for the upcoming Have a Nice Day tour, and with the input of production manager John ‘Bugzee’ Hougdahl, we started discussing ideas involving the high-definition video element that we are currently using. In addition to the HD screen, we wanted to expand on the idea of video incorporated with lighting, all triggered from the lighting console. Spike started putting ideas on paper and they all said, ‘Yes,’ after being a little reluctant due to fear of getting lost in all the layers of video. But they trusted us, and because we were the first to really use HD and videotriggered effects through the lighting console, they were enthused.

“We are using several prototype interface pieces. The first is the interface between lighting and video called the Vista Systems Spyder. The Spyder gives me the ability to control the different layers on the HD, as well as all the other imaging surfaces, through the MA Lighting grandMA console. I can run Imag effects or media from the Green Hippo Hippotizer to any video layer in the system. It was made possible through the expertise of software developer Stewart White. He wrote the software and built the DMX fixtures in the grandMA.

“The five video trusses—the so-called ‘fingers’—incorporate Saco V-9 video modules to relay the I-mag and media. The intensity and quality of the images on them are awesome. The fingers are processed through a G5 Mac.

“The Element Labs Versa Tubes surround the band risers and add a nice accent for camera background shots and tasteful stage looks. They are processed through Mac minis. As for programming and playback, of course, all this would be a nightmare without the help of the Zandar Monitor display computer at the Front of House. This computer configures my preview monitors that show me what everything is doing. As for the rest of the design, it’s pretty straightforward. We use Main Lights Soft LED for a background, and the lighting is made up of 100 Martin moving heads and Fag Pods for audience illumination.

“The Spyder was cumbersome at first and it has a slight learning curve, but it turned out to be very user friendly. I elected to bring in Justin Collie of Artfag to program, mainly due to the time frame given. He programmed most of the finger content. I had used the Hippotizer before on No Doubt and Destiny’s Child, so I was very comfortable with it as my media server.

“The MA Lighting grandMA console is a tool that I can’t do without. The flexibility is just magic. Having so many different fixtures with the ability to organize your show in a manageable way is the secret.

“All my lighting and video crew have been with me before on other projects, which was a huge relief at the start of the tour. This crew knows what I expect and also take just as much pride in their work as I do in mine. It’s simply a pleasure.

“Ed & Ted’s Excellent Lighting came through like no other company. Not only did they provide a top-notch crew and equipment, but they were also involved with my custom Front of House system rack. They did all the research on several components and set up my whole tool box. An LD is only as good as the tools provided for the job. It was all perfect! Kevin Foster of Ed & Ted’s was our tour rep and he rocks.

“Nocturne provides all the video that we currently have on this show. They are a giant asset to this production. XL Video will be joining the tour on our stadium dates this summer providing a new video mesh, which I’m very much looking forward to playing with. They will be providing digital side screens as well.”

Bon Jovi Hi-Def Video
By David John Farinella

Bon Jovi might just as well do away with the idea of cheap seats, considering that a high-def video system is being used on the Have a Nice Day tour for the first time ever. So, those in the back rows are seeing just as good of an image as those in the front row.

David Lemmink, who is serving as the video engineer on this tour and is the director of engineering at the Illinois-based Nocturne Productions, Inc., has heard a number of times how clear the video image was during the show. “A lot of them don’t realize that they were watching one of the largest high-definition video screens in the world,” he says. “They just notice how clear the images are. On the shots where you see the audience, you can literally read the T-shirts of the people in the audience.”

The cutting-edge system, Lemmink says, starts with five Thomson Grass Valley LDK 6000 high-definition cameras and two Ikegami HDL-40 high-definition cameras that ride on Fujinon CPT-10 pan-tilt heads. The team is using a Grass Valley Kalypso switcher and a 64 by 64 Grass Valley Concerto high-definition video router. The video processing is done with three Vista  Systems 353 video processors and a pair of Grass Valley Turbo iDDR recorders and three Green Hippo Hippotizers provide playback. The program is recorded every night on Sony HD cam recorders.

The live feed and custom content are shown on Nocturne’s new V9 screen that was custom-made by Saco. “We designed this to be the premier LED screen for the industry,” Lemmink reports. “It is about a third of the weight of anything that’s out there.” That was important, he points out, because the 40-foot-wide high-definition screen flies over the head of the band after opening up like a garage door. “It also offers a very wide viewing angle so you can see the image clearly and in the correct color off axis,” he says.

In addition to the big screen, there are five strips of the V9 screen, which are 50 feet long and about 1.5 feet wide, that they call “fingers.” “They display a lot of eye candy and live video,” Lemmink explains. At side stage, a pair of Barco high-def projectors provide coverage to those fans via a 9- by 16-foot high-def video screen and in the back of the stage a Main Light Industries SoftLED curtain carries playback from the Turbos and the Hippotizers.

All of the video is controlled from the lighting console, so the lighting designer is controlling the video imagery. “It’s to the point that he’s writing cues that run in sync with the lighting instruments,” Lemmink says. “He literally controls the video equipment as if it were a lighting instrument.”

In terms of signal flow, video director Tony Bongiovi selects program cuts from the live video, merges that with preprogrammed playback material. “So, we are essentially cutting together a live video,” Lemmink reports. “That is presented on a screen in such a way that you could have multiple sets of images or you could have different views. For instance, you could have two views of Jon or six views of the band at any one time. Then that, all tied in with the video imagery, is matching what is happening in the lighting area itself. So, once the program cuts are put into the system, then the lighting designer is using it as part of his palette to essentially color the stage.”

Doug “Spike” Brant of Artfag, LLC, who is also responsible for the tour’s set design, created all of the content for the show. Most of the images were shot on high-def cameras for use on the tour. “One of the things we noticed was that because high definition is in its infancy, there aren’t the same kind of libraries of footage that you have with standard definition video,” Lemmink points out. “So, we decided we were going to have to create all of it ourselves.”

The system, as being used on this Bon Jovi tour, has been used at the Super Bowl, the Grammys and the Academy Awards, and will be available to other tours at the end of this run.

Lemmink, who designed U2’s Zoo TV tour, reports that this is the largest video system that he’s designed in some time. The fact that it’s HD takes it to a whole other level. “I think we’ve set a precedent now,” he says. “We’ve essentially taken the next step in video so that we can display as pristine of an image as we can on as large of a screen as we can.”