Travis Shaffer, who leads the scenic shop at Upstaging, came up with the idea to fabricate the “Steal Your Face” scenic element framing Dead & Company’s circular video element on the band’s tour last fall. After figuring out the size of the circular truss wrapping the projection screen, “I superimposed a PDF of the ‘Steal Your Face’ logo on another layer and scaled it until the forehead matched the truss. I now had the exact size and specs I needed for the perimeter.” After factoring in the need to have the set element broken down to fit set carts, Shaffer fed the coordinates of the CAD drawing directly a machine at Upstaging that precision-cuts plywood. “Once we had the plywood outline, we took large blocks of foam and cut them down” for the two-sided element. Using a hot-wire device and a projection of the logo on the foam, the Upstaging artists started sculpting. The foam was then hardened with a fiberglass coating to stand up to the rigors of the road. At that point, the “dead head” only needed a coat of bone-colored paint and fabric to hide the circle truss before springing to life as the central focal point of the show visuals.
—From “Wide Angle: Dead & Company Hit the Road” by Richard Olson, PLSN, Dec. 2015, page 34.
