The reunion tour of Blink-182 is one of the hottest tickets around as the band has been packing audiences into arenas. Tom DeLonge, Travis Barker, and Mark Hoppus have reunited as Blink-182 for the first time since 2015. Be it nostalgia for the fans who grew up enjoying Blink’s pop-punk sound mixed or the band’s brand of humor and wildly fun live shows, audience are sure to have a great time at the current incarnation. And that is by design. Production Designers John McGuire and Eric Gorleski of TrasK House Design, and Lighting Director, Griffin Dennen filled us in about their approach to the bLinK-182 World Tour 2023/2024.
Talk about the overall design. What was the design aesthetic you wanted for this tour?
McGuire: Blink is a three-piece rock band that doesn’t need anything else other than a three-piece rock band and microphones onstage. So minimalism and getting the most amount of people to see them because it’s Blink-182. The only thing we needed to do was make sure it was a proper production for the venues that they’re playing in. It really was about how to keep the band as close to each other as possible and fill every seat in the house and do a fun production to support that.
Tell us about the use of video and automation in the design.
McG: Yeah, the video on this one is a cool three-dimensional box that moves around, splits and shifts a bit. We needed to create space on this show where the inflatables come in, so we shift things around. The screens are automated so that they can construct a sort of house, they can move and articulate in ways that provide different surfaces to tell the story we’re going through. The screens are, when in it’s closed position, a proper box. That box itself then can split, create larger screens, create smaller screens, and it’s kind of fun. It’s taking the idea of cinematic scaling. Here’s Panavision, this one’s in portrait, this one’s in landscape. It has enough life to it that it keeps the viewer’s attention. The content really goes through and nails some of the life of the band. TrasK did all the content and I am really proud of it. I couldn’t be happier with the whole team and the pieces of work they produced.
Gorleski: I think the content for Blink is super unique in that Blink has such an established graphic styling, and also a kind of varied graphic styling across their branding, but obviously they have over a decade of existing brand assets. We did historic deep dives of their past shows and brand visuals. It was about looking at how to take their career of visuals and remake them for the modern audience.
And what about the lighting design? Layering that in with the video.
McG: Well, obviously thematically, matching color and moods and feels, giving the video wall and the content the breadth and the space it needs are all considerations in the lighting design. But also inside this cube there’s an automated lighting truss as well that comes in. We have a house scene and there’s this truss inside that just peaks right underneath, the cube is in an up position, so it peaks right below that and grazes the back of the band. Just accentuates the content very well, because we have these amazing [Martin] MAC Ultras, these profiles that just punch through and can replicate color so accurately to video. It looks great. I would say probably one of the other really successful multi-department moments is “Aliens Exist”. We have an inflatable alien ship dome that has a short throw projector inside of it and we have a high contrast RP surface. On the video screen you see this alien ship going through warp speed, flying this way and that. And then timed to the video, automation lifts up this curved dome. So now we’re seeing instead of the spaceship being off in the distance, it comes into the foreground, the physical, inflatable spaceship comes up, it gets lit to match how it’s lit inside the video and this green lighting and the projector kicks on. You see the alien and the bunny fighting inside the dome and then it goes back out where then the spaceship dips back into the video screen and matches the lighting environment. It very successfully combines the scenery, the fun of having inflatables, the lighting and the video all together.
Dennen: Yeah, it is fun to light the inflatables, like when we use nice animation wheel looks on the inflatable ambulance. The video content for that is a street scene and we have the inflatable ambulance, in front of the screen, driving down the street past the video windows and lamp posts. That was a fun challenge to figure out how to, in a theatrical manner, to integrate the video lighting across the inflatable itself. I’ve had people come to the show and say, ‘Oh, I didn’t even realize it was an inflatable for the ambulance.’ It’s nice to really have made that work so well. Actually, the inflatables weren’t a problem, it was all the confetti that was a bit of a fun problem for the lighting. I had to put mosquito nets over my console every day because the confetti falling on the console interacts with the MA screens and pushes buttons.
McG: I think that that’s something which is super unique about a Blink show, it is theatrical and over the top. As much as they’re a rock band that you are designing for, you’re creating a super fun environment that the fans have come to expect for a Blink show to happen in.
Speaking of theatrical, talk about the levitating drum riser that is hoisted up.
McG: At the end of the day, we have done every drum gag with Travis Barker known to man. And the goal on this one was not to flip him, turn him, or twist him. It was just to really elevate him and allow Travis to be the monster drummer that he is. The only thing we need to do for Mark and Tom is let them pull to a corner and accentuate their solo, so we thought for Travis, we just need to elevate him for a bit and visually create those drum moments. There are these massive, powerful drum moments in a few of the songs and we just accentuate them with the appropriate level of production by elevating him and then with the lighting, just allowing him to be the monster.
Going back to lighting, you mentioned liking the MAC Ultra.
McG: The f**king MAC Ultra is so beautiful.
GD: That’s the quote of the article, ‘The f**king MAC Ultra is beautiful.’ And it really, really is.
McG: I’ve been doing this a long time and you see lights coming out of a cannon all of the time, but then you see the MAC Ultra and it is just awesome. I think ultimately this being a punk rock show, you want to have bright lights that cut through, but not just in white, with color. We had used Ultras on the Machine Gun Kelly tour and really fell in love with them. For Blink, the shop setup a shootout because they didn’t have the MAC Ultras to give us, but when we looked at all the lights it was just abundantly clear that the Ultra stood out above all of them. Everything from strobe rate to intensity and saturate color, zoom range. We literally went feature by feature, and I think the only thing it didn’t win in was maybe tilt speed or something. And even that was barely by a hair.
GD: Solotech provided the lighting and they were great. They got us the MAC Ultras. Their support on the whole tour has been wonderful as well. I’ve not had an issue that hasn’t been quickly addressed and fixed. Speaking for lighting, I can say the lighting crew’s amazing.
McG: Yeah, they provided the video as well and have been great. Solotech has been good to work with, both lighting and video.
And SGPS did the scenic and automation work for you guys?
McG: They have been amazing, really great, wonderful. Big kudos to the legacy of Eric Pearce that they are all carrying on. They are earning all the success that SGPS continues to have and they are moving forward. Just really a big congratulations to that whole company for being who they are and respecting that legacy everyday with how they work at SGPS.
Production Team
- Tour Manager: Michael Sullivan
- Production Manger Leg 1: Rodney Johnson
- Production Manager Leg 2: Jimi Storey
- Production Designer: John McGuire, TrasK House
- TrasK House Design Team: Eric Gorleski, Luam Keflezgy, Malik Grant
- Previs Tech: Ben Wingrove
- Resolume Programmer: Conner Coffman
- Lighting Director: Griffin Dennen
- Lighting Crew Chief: Kevin Chan
- Lighting Crew: JP Blier, Gabriel Foucault Lemieu, Dory Reyes, James Kassabian, Nikki Nowinski
- Video Director: Pedro Pineda
- Video Crew Chief: Marshall Blair
- Video Crew: Nick Lepoutre, Maek Gonzaba, Dave Bergfeld, Marcus Benjamin
- LED Lead: Martin Provost
- LED Techs: William Sherman, Mike Cloud
- SFX Crew Chief: Bryan Ratay
- SFX Crew: JB Culp, Brandon Messersmith, Chad Freeman
- SFX & Laser Programmer: Nick Arnold
- Pyrotechnics Programmer: Phil Green
- Automation Operator: Daniel Sturman
- Automation Crew Chief: Len Purciful
- Automation Techs: Drew Purciful, Taylor Baker
- Tour Rigger: Nick Purciful
- Lead Carpenter: Patrick Purciful
- Carpenters: Tom Hale, Rami Hilal, Addison Sturdivant
Vendors
- Lighting and Video: Solotech
- Scenic & Automation: SGPS, Benjamin Lampman, Heather Poitevin
- Inflatables: Inflatable Design Group
- Special Effects: Image Engineering, Doug Adams
- Content: TrasK House
- Trucking: Truck n Roll
Gear
Lighting
- 2 MA Lighting grandMA3
- 1 MA Lighting grandMA3 Compact
- 3 MA Lighting grandMA NPU
- 5 Luminex 16XT Switch
- 4 Luminex 26i Switch
- 8 Luminex Luminode 12
- 68 Martin MAC Ultra
- 48 Claypaky Mythos 2
- 27 GLP FR10 Bar
- 36 GLP JDC1 Strobe
- 30 4 Lite Conventional Blinder
- 2 Robe BMFL FollowSpot
Video
- 2 Resolume Video Server
- 1 Director and Engineering Bridge
- 144 ROE Visual CB5 LED Panel
Special Effects
- 6 Kvant 33W RGBY Spectrum Laser
- 6 Artistry in Motion Big Blaster
- 3 MagicFX Stadium Shot Confetti Unit
- 4 Club Cannon Quad Jet
- 4 Salamander Quad Pro Unit
- 1 FireOne Control Package
