In support of their newest album, 72 Seasons, Metallica has been playing two-night, no-repeat shows—first in Europe and now in North America on the M72 Tour. For the curious, the 72 refers to the 72 seasons that make up a person’s formative first 18 years of life. Performing on a truly massive ring-shaped stage—with the Snake Pit in the center—the band is redefining the meaning of playing stadiums in the round. For the elegant circular design—complete with surrounding immense production towers—Creative Director/Production Designer, Dan Braun, Lighting Designer Rob Koenig, and Video Director/Designer, Gene McAuliffe have gone big while paradoxically creating an intimate stadium environment that perfectly showcase the iconic hard rockers.
DAN BRAUN
Creative Director/Production Designer
Braun has been with Metallica since 1994, in a variety of roles and brings all that experience to his work as Creative Director. Having designed a number of memorable stages for the band over the years, he is taking particular pride in this one, though he is quick to note the team it took to realize this design. “This show is all a collaborative effort,” says Braun, “and we have a lot of fun doing it. I’m very fortunate, I work with a great band. We’re not trying to enhance something that isn’t awesome. In many ways, they’re the four kids who got together in the garage and said, ‘we’re going to be kings of our universe.’”
Metallica, like many bands, feeds off the energy from the audience, which elevates the whole experience. “It’s all about the band,” says Braun, “and with this band, that’s easy. A Metallica show is 50% band, 50% audience. James [Hetfield] calls it the ‘Metallica family,’ and that’s something that’s very near and dear to all our hearts. To me, it’s about the band generating the energy and delivering that to the audience; the audience taking it and amplifying it and giving it back, and that pushes the band to a new place, which keeps going around. That cycle is what I consider a Metallica show; that’s the magic, that interaction between the act and the fans. That is where I start with the design. It needs to be part of that interaction, part of letting it happen.”
Centering the Circle
In response to the band’s request to play stadiums in-the-round, Braun recalls, “My first response was, ‘you realize that that is going to be an enormous undertaking, and really expensive to do it at scale.’ But it was what they wanted to do.” As for the design concept, he says, “Well, nature’s simplest shape is a circle. So, we took a circle, and now, what do we do with it? A circle is often iconography that’s used for life. It all made sense to me, but we couldn’t just plop a circle in the middle of the field and let the band play on it. On the last tour, we started playing with moving Lars [Ulrich] closer to the audience. In the end, he really loved it. So I wanted to do that on this one. Then we started asking, ‘How do we get the fans in the circle?’ A ring with the Snake Pit in the middle. Then we have lights, video, and audio, but nothing overhead, so then we made a circle of towers to support all the rest of that stuff. Since we were playing in circles, we made the video screens circular. It is all circles, cylinders really, which seem to make sense when you see it and people seem to be enjoying it. And even though it is in a stadium, it feels more intimate; the fans have been brought into the circle. Everybody who comes to the show has their own experience, wherever they are seated or standing. Maybe you experienced something that the guy 10 seats over didn’t. When they look through the band, they’re looking through at the rest of the Metallica family, because it’s one show. That’s very much something I tried to put into the design.”
A Cozy Stadium
When you look at the stage and the towers, it’s deceivingly spare and elegantly clean looking. When that’s brought up to Braun, he laughs, saying “yeah, you look at it and it seems like there is nothing there, it’s 66 trucks of nothing! The irony is not lost on me. I too look at it and there’s nothing there, yet there’s actually a ton there. Somehow, that’s Metallica to me; all of that is the paradox that is Metallica. I think part of the success of this design is because we got the proportions right, which I spent a lot of time studying. We got a ton of pushback, but the band stood firm. People said, ‘You can’t put that there. There are sightline issues.’ We had to say, no, the scale is so big; look to your left, look to your right. You’ll find a new view. It’s the idea that everyone has an individual view. One of the things that I pride myself on is trying to make the room feel intimate; to make it feel small. The first review I read of this show called it cozy, that somehow we’d made a stadium cozy! We have changed the experience of a show in an 80,000 seat stadium. We spent a lot of time working on the proportions; how high the towers, how big is the stage, all to get it to have the feel it does. The stage is big! It has a diameter of 40 yards, which makes it seem to dwarf the stadium and creates a feeling of a more intimate space.”
The stage, which was built by TAIT, is 120’ in diameter and the ring’s stage floor is 20’ wide. The stage has elevation changes over the course of the 400’ circumference run around the circle, so the height changes from 3’-6” ramping up to 5’-6”, and there are stairs up to 7’-6”. There are four custom integrated SLOAT (Sliding Lid Over A Trap) lifts/revolves for the four drum sets. They are equally spaced out around the circular stage so drummer Lars Ulrich can get closer to the audience at various points in the show. That lift platform measures 11’ x 11’ and goes 5’-6” high when raised. There are eight, 100’ tall ground supported towers circling the stage. The video, lighting and audio are all mounted together on each of the cylindrical towers. These are were the true team effort is on display from concept, engineering to execution every show. All the crews work closely together in the shared vertical ‘cans’, as they call them, to layer the various production elements, cabling and wind bracing.
It’s a Partnership
When asked about the support of his staging vendors, Braun responds with, “I don’t consider them vendors, I consider them partners. TAIT and Stageco, both companies, have helped us make the dreams come true, which takes great partners. Their support is unbelievable and ongoing. It’s an ongoing partnership; we’re together still trying everyday to make load-ins go better. They stay with us, they don’t stop when the tour starts. That goes for all our partners, lighting, video, audio, they are all working with us and doing great work.” A particular challenge in the round was the pyro for the show, which was handled by Pyrotech. “There’s a lot of rules and regulations about pyro,” says Braun. “[Chief Show Designer] Reid Derne and the team at Pyrotech, did a remarkable job of figuring out exactly where we could put flames, where we could do things. It is always a challenge, and they always keep working to make it better and more impactful.”
“No one does these things alone,” continues Braun. “What about the guy in the shop who figured out how you could hang it? What about the guy who figured out how to power it? No one does this stuff alone, and I’m fortunate to be part of a great team. Whether that’s the production team or the team of vendors. The guys at PGP on the lighting side, and my crew, get tired of hearing me say, ‘when I go to Broadway, I don’t see cables and cases. We spend as much as they do to build a Broadway show, why am I seeing a cable there?’ They work hard to keep it clean looking; they know what we want and they really deliver. We all push hard to try to get things exactly right so we create the experience people have when they come into the show. Our show is made that when you come into the stadium for two or three hours, it’s interesting to look at. It is all intentional. You’re not looking at the boneyard. There is no off-stage part of the show, the entire stadium is ‘on camera’, if you will. That’s unique in our show. You don’t see case lids and things piled up. There are no piles of junk covered in black Duvetyne.”
While Braun has long and strong relationships with most of his partner vendors, this is the first Metallica tour where the video package and crew were supplied by 4Wall Entertainment. “It’s a big change for us, and it’s been great,” Braun says. “Brad Hafer and David Hunkins are just great. We talked with 4Wall and told them what we were looking for and man, they just hit the ball out of the park. We’re using more cameras; certainly, more than we’ve ever used and we’ve improved the cameras. The quality of all the gear they have supplies is unbelievable. They’ve helped us do research to get the best possible results we could out of their products. We want to deliver the greatest show we can. Not the greatest Metallica show; our goal is to deliver a great, incredible experience and they share that goal.”
In terms of lighting, LD Rob Koenig is again back working closely with Braun, who explains he wanted to take the lighting to a different place for this tour. “I got with Rob Koenig—I do the architecture and Rob does the art—and said to him, ‘I want to light this thing, so it looks like every seat is involved in the show.’ Rob did a remarkable job of laying that whole thing out so that we have lights in a lot of places. His programmers, Joe [Cabrera] and Cat [West], were great as well. This show involved our whole production department getting the gear in the right place and all the adjustments that went with that. We’ve got lights surrounding the field on the ground to make more of the entire stadium part of the show. We set out to intentionally do that and we put a lot of resources into doing it. Rob has done a great job of executing it, and the fans do their part during the show, so that’s been fun.”
ROB KOENIG
Lighting Designer
Having started working with Metallica in 2008, Koenig took over as Lighting Designer in 2014. When asked what he thinks of the results, you get a truly Koenig take on his own work. “I’m really thrilled with the way it turned out. There’re some things that I wouldn’t mind changing, of course. There are always those things you want to change in retrospect.” From the audience however, Koenig, and the lighting team, have done it again creating a dynamic and memorable design that truly showcases Metallica in the best light.
Big Rig
For the design in terms of where to place the lights, a lot of that started with Braun’s overall vision for the whole design. At 650 lights, it’s the biggest rig Koenig has traveled with for Metallica. “A lot of that came from Dan,” says Koenig. “He had some general ideas about where we wanted to place lighting, so I followed his lead. We came up with new positions and he had the idea for the tower system. The thing about any in-the-round show is you certainly need more lights than you would normally have for an end stage show. Also, you’re always trying to give a show to everybody in the audience as much as possible. So, I needed to make sure that the band was lit from every angle, always, because at the end of the day, people want to see the band, especially this band. You want to bring the show to everybody, from the floor all the way to the nosebleeds.”
As noted, the main lighting positions are in the eight, 100’ tall ground supported towers along with all the video screens and much of the PA. “They were quite an engineering feat, to say the least. Each one weighs like 72 tons,” says Koenig. “There was a lot of back and forth on positions and engineering requirements. We had TAIT create 144 specialized clamps for the VL3600s to marry up with the CHAUVET STRIKE Ms, because there was a position where I needed to double them up. [PM Anthony Kordyjaka] Geddy with Premier Global worked with TAIT on the sizing and spacing to make sure that the lights functioned as we needed. We all worked together on the towers.”
Koenig chose the IP65 rated Vari-Lite VL3600 as his workhorse light. “I felt that the VL3600 was just a bit more elegant than another unit I had considered and really liked the VL3600’s quality of light, knowing it’s an LED fixture. The color mixing in it is terrific. It wasn’t the brightest light in the test, but everything it did, it did well. On the towers total, we have 72 on top, 72 on bottom. Dan and I joked about it, but we had to work in multiples of 72 as much as we possibly could.”
Koenig laughs and continues, “Each tower has nine VL3600s on top, nine on bottom. Married up with each one of those is the Chauvet Color STRIKE M, yet another great IP65 rated fixture. The Strike M has been wonderful for us. There are three video screens per tower, they wrap around with a gap in between each of the screens. On the front side gap, we have a ladder beam with seven [Robe] BMFL WashBeams in each tower. Then on the bottom rungs of those ladders are our two followspots, which are BMFL LTs. When you move to the stage area, we’ve got the stage wrapped in SGM VPL Touring linear LED strips along with 24 [SGM] Q-7s and 48 [Claypaky] Sharpy Aqua Pluses around the stage.”
Moving out to the house positions, along the edges of the stadium, Koenig placed 72 Elation Excalibur luminaires in eight groups of nine. Those are positioned in the corners of the field, on risers and used for big aerials throughout the show. They provide background looks that fill the stadium, matching the energy of the music. “We needed a howitzer for that position because we don’t know where exactly they will be placed. It depends on the venue, the size, and fire code,” explains Koenig. “We needed something that could go to the end zone and still read on camera shooting all the way back towards the stage. We also go straight across the stage at the band with them, almost like they are attacking the stage.” When testing fixtures for that position, Koenig says the Excalibur was the brightest fixture they encountered. “It has a giant [10”] piece of glass for the front lens and is a nice cannon of a light. Also, the color mixing is really smooth, and it has just enough tricks to give you some flavor throughout the show. It’s not just a collimated beam. We became more reliant on them than we ever anticipated; they are worth their weight in gold. They’re amazing.”
Stellar Support
For the programming, Koenig brought in Cat West and Joe Cabrera from Flash and Trash Works, Inc. knowing that he would need a lot of songs programmed for the tour that promises no repeats over two-night stands. “When Dan said, ‘I think you need two people on,’ it was a no-brainer,” Koenig comments. “Joe is familiar; I’ve worked with him a lot. I’d never really worked with Cat until the Metallica 40th anniversary shows. You hear about yin and yang in relationships. They’re a great example of that because Joe has never been a touring LD, he’s always been a programmer. He’s got a methodical, very well-thought-out approach to every keystroke. Cat’s the opposite. Like myself, she come from guerrilla warfare of doing festivals; ‘get ready, go.’ We come from a very different school than Joe does but we all work together great. It was fun getting to work with the two of them and having these two completely different push/pull approaches, which I think gave us an extra layer of flavor on the show.”
Koenig also wanted to ensure that this show be completely unique. “There was no cloning over from previous shows,” he says. “It was built from the ground up; we didn’t want to cheat. We wanted this to be unique, bespoke. We needed to give it the same care and thought process that the band did writing this music. That’s something that’s very important when you’re trying to convey a live show; they’ve spent all this time and effort to write and record this music. To make it sound a certain way and to make it feel a certain way. Our job is to respect that as much as possible.”
The lighting vendor, Nashville-based Premier Global Production, has been supporting Metallica for nearly two decades at this point. [The PGP Account Executive, James Vollhoffer, was the Lighting Crew Chief for Metallica for years.] In a word, Koenig says PGP was “Stellar. The best they’ve ever done for us, and they always are great. They absolutely knocked it out of the park. All the way from fixtures to crew to networking infrastructure. They really put their all into this one. I’ve got such a stellar crew, and it’s not easy to find crew right now. Mat Gass, our Crew Chief, helped assemble one of the best crews I’ve ever toured with. We even have three rookies on the crew. They’ve never toured before, but these kids come in and crush it daily. Everyone’s doing such a great job. They’re a great, great bunch.”
Working Together
The lighting certain stands on its own successfully but as Koenig notes there is more of a theatrical aspect to the current show compared to past tours and that is a result of working as a team production wise. There are now segue intros that add a different dimension. “We have interstitial moments now more frequently than in the past where the band will exit the stage and the next number is introduced with teasing video and lighting,” describes Koenig. “It adds more of a flow, more theatre, and gets the crowd excited. Then boom, they are back on stage. I am loving it because it’s building a bit more mystery, more anticipation for each song.” Koenig enjoyed having the video and lighting working together and says, “I would like more of that. I think this show is ever evolving. There’s some interplay with it, and I would like some more. I’d like that evolution to continue.”
GENE McAULIFFE
Video Director
Gene McAuliffe has been with Metallica since 2016, taking over the role of Video Director in 2017. With the M72 Tour being not just in-the-round but the video being on the circling tower system, it is a new unique design. “The overall design and video application is a little different,” explains McAuliffe. “This design removed the back wall video element from the show; we’ve moved it up high and all around the stage. The eight towers are each wrapped in video, but the big goal from day one has been to unify all these surfaces into a single canvas instead of being individual. It’s absolutely a challenge to put any sort of picture on a round surface and expect everybody in the stadium to see it. That’s really our task—to find the cleanest, most aesthetically pleasing way to tie all these surfaces together allowing everybody to have a view of the band.”
The video screens, which play between 60’ and 90’ high on the towers, are all made with ROE Visual CB5 LED panels, which are owned by the band, along with most of the Brompton Technology processing. All the non-band owned video control and camera package was supplied by 4Wall Entertainment. The touring and 4Wall video team worked with all the other vendor partners to come up with ways to improve mounting options, speed up load-ins and -outs. By being based in Lititz, PA, the 4Wall team conferred with TAIT on engineering some solutions to make life easier for the road crew. “TAIT built some custom headers for the video screens,” says McAuliffe. “The screen can be curved—that’s built into the product design. Those custom headers allow us to pick up two columns per motor instead of one, drastically cutting the motor count, and weight, up on the towers. We are tied closely with lighting, so this custom header includes some lighting mounts as well as some fascia pieces to clean it up. It’s very clean lined, hiding the skeleton from the audience.”
Covering All Angles
With the ring stage around the Snake Pit, and all the potential playing areas for the band members around the circumference of the stage, it takes a lot of cameras for coverage. “Certainly, on the coverage side, that was a big challenge going into this show,” says McAuliffe. “We have 28 cameras, plus another eight—two on each drum kit. Most of that is because with a 360° show, the band really can go anywhere they want. They can turn in any direction, and we have to be ready to pick them up, no matter where they are.” For the main cameras, McAuliffe has a camera at the base of each tower and two handheld cameras in the pit for “the classic rockstar shots.” He continues, “Then, I have four additional box cameras—99x long lenses—we try to get some variety out of those. We put a couple of them up on the concourse level sort of slash position; one of them down low in the end zone to shoot over the top of the audience. I’ve got stadium drawings and try to find places where we can put these cameras that don’t interfere or create seat kills. The idea being, ‘What would the show look like from this seat?’ Trying to bring that view of the show into the broadcast or the cut. We’ve also got two Spidercams that fly around inside the towers. Each of them gets about half of the stage. Those are fantastic tracking dolly shots, as well as using them as a positional camera. I can put them anywhere that I need; it doesn’t always need to be a flying shot or a tracking shot. We use those a lot for coverage around the drum kits, especially with the guys constantly wandering the stage. They can fly themselves into group settings, so it’s easier to pick up than on one of the tower cams.”
With a band that has a catalog of music the depth of Metallica’s, it’s a big ask to create a different look for every song. “That’s a challenge of the show, but that’s also par for the course with these guys, in that every show is different,” states McAuliffe. “Every song should stand on its own and we really want to avoid those traps of just doing the same thing every night. So, coming into this, we started with a list of about 60 songs that were likely to be played. We tried to whittle that down and after discussions with the band, we were given a list of about 40 songs to start with.”
Considered Content
In Metallica’s archives, there are songs where the video content is iconic and has been used for many years. “We have about five or six songs that have legacy content,” McAuliffe says. “It fits perfectly with the songs we use it for. No need to reinvent the wheel. Then we dove into what they play off the new album and asked, ‘How do we want to interpret them into the live show, so there’s some correlation between the music videos and the live show?’ We got through about four of those songs. Next, we went back into the pool of what else could they possibly play to develop some universal looks, where it’s not necessarily a song specific look, but it’s artistic, interesting, and rock and roll. Those can be used in different spots depending on what the set might be. We have about 15 or 20 of those looks that aren’t song specific. We also have the power of I-Mag, so we throw in I-Mag for a couple of songs. We really tried to keep the looks, and the graphic side of things, not overpowering.”
As the video department, McAuliffe feels that they are there to enhance and support what the band is doing, and not take over. “They’re interesting looks, but not distracting,” he says. “And of course, we want each to be different. It was quite a challenge, and I’m very glad I’m not the content creator. Our content guy, Andrea Cuius from Nocte Studio, has done an amazing job pulling content together for this. You never have the time you expected to have, but we have got 50 tracks programmed into our servers. We’re well set up for any curve balls the band could decide to throw at us, plus some spares.” Additional content was also created by Dan Potter of Creative Works for the tour.
For playback, McAuliffe’s video system is running 11 disguise gx 2c media servers with Notch used to affect some of the I-Mag. Video production world is built into six rolling set carts, which allows it to be quick to deploy and to pack up. The heart of the system is a Ross Carbonite 4 M/E switcher. “It’s a 3G show; we’re 4K ready and have that ability, but 3G is just a much friendlier workflow,” comments McAuliffe. “It’s a super high tech video world considering it’s a fly-pack. We are a broadcast truck in a different form.”
A Cohesive Whole
Regarding the support from 4Wall Entertainment providing the video/camera package for their first Metallica tour, McAuliffe says “4Wall absolutely came to play and brought all the best toys they could. They’re not messing around, and they’ve been great. There was a request to make the video system faster to build and faster to pack; 4Wall jumped right on that. They built it all into six rolling set carts. It takes about an hour and a half to set up the core of the system. They absolutely drove that idea and took it to where it is now; six boxes in the truck. And the gear has been fantastic; plus them being based in Lititz has been hugely beneficial in all the prep.” The crew from 4Wall also impressed McAuliffe. “They’ve been fantastic at staffing the positions needed. The entire 4Wall video crew has been amazing. It’s no small feat for these guys to build this thing every day and maintain it. Dave Hunkins, he’s been critical in that happening. Tony Garcia is our Crew Chief, Hayden Katz and Tom Denny are our media server team. Everyone had to rethink things for this one, and they’ve all done an amazing job.”
Speaking of the teamwork, McAuliffe also says, “One of the things that impresses me the most is the symbiotic relationship we have with lighting. Each song has an overall look. There’s no separation between what video is doing versus what lighting is doing. Working with Rob, we try to match color palettes so that we’re all running in the same colors at the same time. It’s a daily check that we do because when the set list gets moved around, we want to try to avoid a blue song into blue song, for the original reason of wanting everything to look different. Both of us really take pride in the idea of how can video help lighting on this one, or how can lighting help video on that one? To me that goes a long way in the end, just having that cohesive feel from start to finish. That would be the one thing that I would ask people to really pay attention to; enjoy the overall show as a whole, and you realize how cohesive everything is. We are all proud of that.”
VENDOR VIEW
STAGECO
Tom Bilsen, Operations Director
“We go a long way back with Metallica. We’ve worked with them on other tours before, and this was one of the most challenging designs. Every time there is a different challenge, but this one was definitely one of the most challenging. It’s not what you would expect the stage to be in a stadium, it is in the middle of the stadium and the video screens are on the towers, the sound is in the towers, the lights are on the towers. It was a challenge. But that is really what we love at Stageco, these kinds of challenges. We started by looking at the numbers, how big do they want to have it, how much weight is the audio, the lighting, the video, and what is the footprint of the bases. The requirement was to be as small as possible in the base, but it needed to take all the load. That is where we started the design and then do the engineering and manufacturing.
“I always love working with Metallica and that team, Dan knows what he wants. I really appreciated that they took the time and spent the effort to do a full test build at our site in Belgium, because it gave us all way more confidence to go on tour. They really took enough care on the preparation side. There was a whole cycle of testing and checking that everything fit it. That was important and also really appreciated due to the quite specific design and all the different companies involved. The cooperation was really great, I must say.”
4WALL ENTERTAINMENT
David Hunkins, Director of Live Events
“There were a lot of cooks that made this come together. We didn’t have a lot of time and we put together some outrageous notions of how to do this to make it better. In terms of the tower specifically, I think the biggest thing we did is approached it not as just 4Wall, not as just video. But right out of the gate when we got to Belgium, we got together with the PGP folks and agreed that if we each go this alone, we’re going to sink. So we started off on the good foot with all departments being all in together, and that one thing, I think. is the biggest success to this project.
“Gene brings this calm and very collected nature to this project that is frankly insane, considering what we are trying to do every day. We’re trying to do way more than we have time to do, but I’ve never seen him falter in any of that. Plus, he’s cutting 37 cameras and he’s doing it very well, and he’s giving direction through that. It really blows my mind how hard he works and how well he does his job. And Dan has incredible vision. He puts together this creative concept of design, of an engineering-based design, noting where all the parts and pieces go, but then trusts everyone else involved to come to him with the best solutions for build that design. Everybody’s opinion is welcomed and valued. And in that process, we got to come up with some really cool solutions for how to build the show, how to operate the show. Also, I can’t stress enough how much we all relied on the talents of the shop. We had seven weeks from when they committed to when it went into containers. Seven weeks.”
PREMIER GLOBAL PRODUCTION
James Vollhoffer, Account Mgr. & Anthony “Geddy” Kordyjaka, Design Mgr.
Vollhoffer: “This one, it’s big, it’s bad and it’s been awesome. Bad in all the good ways. It’s always a pleasure working with Dan and Rob. Taking the design vision and making it a reality; executing. They like pushing things to the next level and that means they need us to really deliver. It comes down to the packaging, the networking, how we lay stuff out, cabling—Dan is very particular about cable management, figuring it all out so it can be a tight ship every day on the tour. There’s no learning curve with how Metallica wants things with us because we’ve been there, done that. It’s just a matter of what’s the new design, what does the new vision entail, and we just execute, execute, execute. At PGP we really pay attention to the details, it is about making it right and tight. It’s a big machine they are touring and all the departments; the whole crew in general, and our PGP team, should be proud how they get it in and out in a timely, safe, professional, efficient manner. It’s been awesome, actually. It’s very impressive.”
Geddy: “Starting in the shop, we made sure they have all the assets they need on site, nothing’s been overlooked. And we’ve got a great crew, in the shop and on the tour. We spent a lot of time thinking about how everything goes together, the infrastructure and how we interface with other departments on this one. We are all literally tied together. The towers are insane—how much we have to work together with video and audio as well. Success was all in the careful planning, the prep and ultimately the execution.”
TAIT
Brian Levine, President & Erin Tiffany, Project Mgr.
Levine: “We have a long history with this camp and love working with them, with Dan. Two things we did very early on helped make this a success. One is, we rented out MetLife stadium and we actually mapped out with Dan and the band, the shape of the stage on the field, just to give the band the full scale feel of it, because it’s a lot of square footage to cover, and that informed some changes. The second thing we did is, we built a mock-up ramp, so that the guys could walk on it and make sure that it was the right angle and that they’d be comfortable. There was a lot of thought that went into how the lower height areas connected to the upper height areas, how it all flowed and tied together. Also, we knew Dan would want it all to look very elegant and need an understanding of what the build order was going to be between lighting, video and audio. We were sort of in the middle of that, helping orchestrate, along with the tour crew, what that was going to be and what they needed from us in terms of how things are going to package and how things are going to deploy to be successful each day.”
Tiffany: “We built it in a way that made it really easy for the stagehands, the roadies, the carpenters to set it up on a day-to-day basis. You need to have some flexibility in it based on how the floors aren’t even. The first place we built this was in a parking lot at Stageco in Belgium, in the pouring rain with uneven floors. So that was a great test to make sure it was going to work everywhere else.”
Production Team
- Creative Director/Production Designer: Dan Braun
- Lighting Designer: Rob Koenig
- Lighting Programmers: Joe Cabrera & Cat West/ Flash and Trash Works, Inc
- Video Director: Gene McAuliffe
- Video Programmer: Hayden Katz
- Content Creation: Andrea Cuius/Nocte, Dan Potter/Creative Works London
- Production Coordinator: Vicki Huxel
- Stage Management: Gino Cardelli, Dewey Evans, Eddie Rocha
- Lighting Crew Chief: Mat Gass
- Head Electrician: Arturo “Tudy” Martinez
- Spot Caller, Backup Console: John Niles
- Networking: Patrick Seig
- RoboSpots: “V”
- Lighting Techs: Cody Carver, Emil Vuorijarvi, Luke Roney, Pedro Pradenas, Seth Filaroski, Shane Mongar, Sonny Hensley
- Video Crew Chief: Anthony Garcia
- Video Engineer/Shaders: David Vega, Jacob Rose
- Server Op: Hayden Katz
- Server Tech: Thomas Denney
- Lead LED Tech/Floater: Michael Campbell
- LED Techs: William Corbani, Tyler Newton Tyler, MaryKate Grimes
- LED/Camera Ops: Matthew Guyton, David Romola, Kenneth Patterson, Cameron Trosper, Matthew Abbott, Alison Robeson
- Camera/Utility: David Bartlett, Stephen Serra, Parker Robbins
- Head Rigger: Chad Koehler
- Head Carp: Michael Pettit
- Pyro Shooter: Tristan Ford
Vendors
- Lighting: Premier Global Production
- Lighting Client Rep: James Vollhoffer
- Lighting Project Manager: Anthony “Geddy” Kordyjaka
- Video: 4Wall Entertainment
- Video Project Manager: David Hunkins
- Staging: TAIT, Stageco
- TAIT Rep: Brian Levine
- TAIT Project Manager: Erin Tiffany
- Stageco Rep: Tom Bilsen
- Pyrotechnics: Pyrotek Special Effects
- Pyrotek Project Manager: Reid Derne
Gear
Lighting
- 72 Elation Proteus Excalibur
- 144 Vari-Lite VL3600
- 144 CHAUVET Color Strike M
- 48 Claypaky Sharpy Plus Aqua
- 56 Robe BMFL WashBeam
- 16 Robe BMFL FollowSpot LT
- 24 SGM Q-7
- 77 SGM 4’ VPL
- 27 SGM 2’ VPL
- 38 Solaris Flare Mozart One
- 8 Robe RoboSpot Controllers
- 10 Look Solutions Orka Fogger
- 8 Look Solutions Viper deLuxe Fogger
- 3 MA Lighting grandMA2 full-size
- 4 MA Lighting grandMA2 NPU
Video
- 1,680 ROE Visual CB5 Full Tile, Air Frames
- 16 Brompton Technology SX40 LED Processor
- 48 Brompton Technology XD10 Box
11 disguise GX2c Media Server - 1 Ross Ultrix FR5 Router
- 1 Ross Carbonite CB3x Panel
- 1 Ross Carbonite Black Plus
- 1 Lightware 24×24 HDMI 2.0 Matrix
- 1 Blackmagic Design 40×40 Video Hub
- 2 MA Lighting grandMA3 Lite Console
- 2 MA Lighting grandMA3 Fader Wing
- 2 MA Lighting grandMA3 NPU (M)
- 15 Panasonic AK4000 4K Camera
- 12 Panasonic AW-UE150 PTZ Camera
- 8 Panasonic Drum Camera
- 2 Sony P1 Box Camera, Spidercam
- 16 Fujinon Camera Lenses, Various Focal Lengths
