On Sunday, December 10, the TikTok In The Mix Festival took place in front of a sold-out crowd of 17,000 music fans at the Chicago Cubs spring training facility, Sloan Park in Mesa, AZ. Billed as “the first-of-its-kind live global experience on TikTok”, they brought in 9.6 million viewers tuning in live—the biggest ever live event on TikTok—and set a viewing record of 33.5 million viewers counting the original broadcast and three rebroadcasts. The five-hour music event featured a slate of genre-defining musicians, including headliners Cardi B, Niall Horan, Anitta, Charlie Puth, Offset, and Peso Pluma, special performances by Reneé Rapp, and up-and-coming artists from TikTok’s Elevate program, Isabel LaRosa, Kaliii, LU KALA, and Sam Barber. For those who missed the initial broadcasts of the TikTok In The Mix Festival, streaming services Disney+ and Hulu have a one-hour special with highlights from the festival event.
Paul Hourican, Global Head of Music Partnerships & Programming at TikTok, in speaking about the Festival said: “In The Mix was an awe inspiring event where fans and artists came together to celebrate what we love about TikTok, where the power of the platform’s music discovery played out on stage. An event of this magnitude truly takes a village, thank you to the amazing line-up of incredible artists, our partners, the sold-out crowd in Arizona, and the record-breaking audience who watched around the world in their millions on TikTok.” The TikTok In The Mix Festival was created by award-winning director Hamish Hamilton and Done+Dusted and was co-produced by TikTok and GroupM Motion Entertainment and sponsored by Paramount and Coca Cola.
The lighting design for the festival—including the main stage, brand activations, performers’ additional equipment, and site lighting—were designed by Tom Sutherland and his team from the LA-based DX7 DESIGN. Sutherland recently lit the opening ceremony for the Formula 1 Heineken Silver Las Vegas Grand Prix 2024 and numerous MTV Video Music Awards. The production design was executed by Julio Himede and his team from the New York-based design firm Yellow Studio. Sutherland took some time to speak with PLSN about the lighting solutions he brought to the challenges of this massive festival event.
On a festival show, like the TikTok In The Mix Festival, that lasted over five hours, and had so many performances, how did you approach your lighting design for the main stage?
This was a tough one, really, because we only had the evening before, with the acts, some of which we saw in daylight. So, we actually saw them for the first time at night, when we were live! A lot of it, with a show like TikTok, is just making sure that you set yourself up for success. Making sure that you have the right lights in the right places, as well as doing as much as you can the night before. It’s all in the preparation, really. That’s the key to when you run and gun one of these types of shows.
Talk about balancing your lighting design not only for the audience in attendance, but also for the broadcast audience.
When we were pulling things in, the night before, with the Vision guys, we certainly looked at it by eye first, and set a good level to the eye, and then pulled the cameras into the mix. Sloan Park is a smallish stadium, which is a kind of weird shape, as well. So, it was quite a long distance for some people in the crowd, so we had to make sure that there was enough punch from the key lights, to cover both of those elements—fans live in the park, and the TikTok broadcast audience.
The event worked in a funny way, really. There was the music broadcast, but then there was the show broadcast, as well. There were two production trucks that would bounce between each other, but that all came with two talkback comm systems and everything like that. So, it was certainly a juggling gap, figuring out between us all, what was going on between the music broadcast, the live broadcast, and the event itself.
What were some of the challenges working with the main stage design and how did you solve them?
When we went into this, nobody quite knew what type of festival it would be. We thought it would just be artists getting up on stage and doing a performance, but then, slowly and surely, it turned into a mini-Coachella, and lots of artists wanted to do highly choreographed, bespoke pieces with props, and choreographed camera movement, and choreographed lighting as well. That turned into a challenge. Just with the rehearsal time alone, we had to do quite a lot of that in previews, but then, of course, you have to translate anything that you do in previews into the real world. So, we were there to the early hours of the morning the night before, just going through all of the acts, cue by cue, and making sure that all of our ducks were in a row. Then it certainly was holding our breath, as we got into the live performance.
Talk about the logistics of working with all the musical acts, your rehearsal and programming time on site.
We only had the day before, and we only saw all the acts in real time once; we didn’t even stop and start with them. Once they started, we just fired on through. We spent as much time, the night before the rehearsal, bumping through the previews, and just pulling all of that into the real world, and adjusting as we went along. After rehearsing with the acts, we then went back through everything again and correcting the things that didn’t work. That pretty much took the entirety of the night before the show. It was a tough schedule, this one, certainly to bring it all to life!
Talk about the collaboration between you and your team with the performers’ creative teams and the artists themselves.
Each of the performers had their own creative team. It was working with them closely, just to help guide them, to make sure that their show looked amazing, but also, to make sure that we could do everything that they wanted in the timeframe, given that we only had a 45-minute rehearsal with each act! It was certainly just guiding all of the artists’ camps into making sure that everything was feasible within that timeframe, to avoid any disappointment.
So, a little less time than you have with the MTV Video Music Awards?
Yes, exactly. A little less, but with the same ambitions, though.
Talk about collaborating with Production Designer, Julio Himede, and his team, on the TikTok In The Mix Festival project.
Julio is a good friend, and we’ve worked together on a lot of things. I think, certainly, this being TikTok’s first dive into the live music world, they wanted to go in with quite a bang. Julio and I knew that we needed to create something that was going to be a statement piece, which is why we decided to do it in the round, really, so that it would look really immersive on camera, and to the people in the audience. So, we came up with this circular stage, and then, the four towers. I worked closely with Julio to design bespoke lighting within those towers, that Stageco helped develop. It looked like everything was very bespoke to the event, rather than just throwing up lights on top of bits of truss.
Tell us about working with Director Hamish Hamilton and the Done+Dusted team on the TikTok Festival.
I’ve worked a few times with Hamish. He’s great, because Hamish is obviously just so experienced in the field of broadcast and broadcast music shows. He knows what it takes and he understands it. He surrounds himself with people who know what it takes to pull off a project like this.
What were some of your key gear choices and why did you select those units?
Obviously being December, even in Arizona, you don’t quite know what can happen with the weather, so for anything that couldn’t be accessed easily, we tried to make sure it was IP65 rated. On the towers, we used the Robe iFORTES, which were the key light workhorses. The beam fixtures on the towers were all [Robe] MegaPointes that had rain hoods on them, just in case. Then, lining the towers were ACME Pixel Line IPs, which are just super bright, and super reasonably priced. So, we had over 200 of the Pixel Line Ips that framed the screens really nicely and gave us so much punch throughout the show. Surrounding the stage, we had a full perimeter of [GLP] JDC1 strobes, and Elation Proteus Maximus were deployed surrounding the whole field, and the stage, as well. Nicole Barnes and the team at Felix were great. They really embraced this project. The lighting rig was stable throughout the entire run, I don’t think we had to swap anything out, really. I’d like to give thanks to Gafffer Chris Roseli and his team as well for all of their hard work getting the lighting all up and running.
In addition to the main stage, in the center of the ballfield, talk about the lighting requirements and designs for the brand activations and site lighting at the festival.
The brand activations were a whole other thing that came up, really. These were activations that you’d normally see at a three- or four-day type of festival. They turned into their own beasts! Experiential Lighting Designer James Coldicott headed up lighting those activations for me. There were probably close to 10 activations overall, and they all had their own bespoke lighting designs that came along with those activations. That all happened rather late in the day, so that was a bit of a pressured couple of weeks, to design all of those and bring all of them to life. James did a great job with all the lighting for the brand activations.
The TikTok In The Mix Festival had good broadcast numbers, in addition to the audience that saw it live in the venue. Any other thoughts on the audience reaction to this festival event broadcast on TikTok?
Yes, it was a massive response. We had it open on our phones, and we’d never seen viewers go up so quickly for something like this. They ended up with over 30 million viewers, which is kind of unheard of in broadcast terms these days.
PRODUCTION TEAM
Lighting
- Lighting Designer: Tom Sutherland
- Experiential Lighting Designer: James Coldicott
- Senior Associate Designer: Hunter Selby
- Associate Designer: Jasmine Lesane
- Lighting Directors: Harry Forster, James Coldicott, Jasmine Lesane, Hunter Selby
- Lighting Programmers: Bobby Grey, Nate Files
- Gaffers: Chris Roseli, Chris Lopez
- Lighting Vendor: Felix Lighting, Nicole Barnes, Account Executive
Production
- Executive Producers: Katy Mullan, Garrett English, Melanie Fletcher, James Longman
- Executive in Charge of Production: Jesse Craine
- Directed by: Hamish Hamilton
- Creative Producers: Danny Bell, Roisin Moloney
- Production Designer: Julio Himede
- Art Directors: Gloria Lamb, Margaux LaPresle
GEAR
Main Show
- 56 Robe iFORTE
- 108 Elation Proteus Maximus
- 128 Robe MegaPointe
- 48 Robe iSpiider
- 206 CHAUVET Color STRIKE M
- 100 GLP JDC1 Strobe
- 216 ACME Pixel Line IP
- 32 Astera AX2 PixelBar 100
- 3 ARRI SkyPanel S60-C
Followspots
- 8 Robe iFORTE Followspot Performance Adders
Anitta Performance
- 6 Vari-Lite Showline SL Nitro 510C
Cardi B Performance
- 40 GLP JDC1 Strobe
Charlie Puth Performance
- 16 GLP JDC Line 1000
Experiential Brand Activations / Mean Girls Activations
- 12 Elation Proteus Maximus
- 4 Astera AX9 PowerPAR
- 11 Chroma-Q ColorForce II 72
- 5 Chroma-Q ColorForce II 48
- 3 Chroma-Q ColorForce II 12
- 20 Astera Titan Tube
One Love Activations
- 102 Chroma-Q ColorForce II 12
- 22 Astera AX5 TriplePAR
TikTok Activations
- 142 Robe ColorStrobe
Site Lighting
VIP Areas
- 8 Astera AX9 PowerPAR
- 24 Astera AX5 TriplePAR
- 56 Astera Titan Tube
Artist Areas
- 6 Robe ColorStrobe
- 9 Astera AX9 PowerPAR
- 8 Astera Titan Tube
Guest Areas
- 24 Robe ColorStrobe
Additional Broadcast – Press, Interview Areas
- 2 Elation Proteus Maximus
- 17 Robe ColorStrobe
- 4 ARRI L7-C
- 9 ARRI SkyPanel S60-C
- 8 Astera Titan Tube
- 1 Chroma-Q ColorForce II 72
- 2 Chroma-Q ColorForce II 48
