Production Profile

Maroon 5’s Overexposed world tour, which ran through late April in the U.S. and is set to resume in the U.K. and Europe in Jan. 2014, has emerged as the largest production for the band to date and also marked the first time production designer and creative director Demfis Fyssicopulos worked with the Grammy winning group. The design for the tour’s latest incarnation starts with a large mainstage in the shape of the letter “M,” which works together with the Roman symbol for “5” (a “V”) that doubles as the downward-pointing angle for the “M.”

Grammy-winning alt-folk artists and multi-instrumentalists Mumford & Sons know a thing or two about putting on an exciting show. Their live concerts are nothing short of a rip-roaring ride on an emotionally draining musical rollercoaster propelled by gut-wrenching vocals, feverish banjo pickin,’ rousing bittersweet string passages, throbbing kick drum patterns and the occasional self-deprecating, expletive-laced rant.

At first glance, the design for the Bon Jovi Because We Can world tour looks extremely simple. When the show opens, there is no video screen, just a wide-open stage and not a lot of lights. On the surface, it seems that Performance Environment Designer Doug “Spike” Brant has taken a severely minimalistic design approach. Nothing could be further from the truth; however. Instead, the environment reveals itself, literally at the cue of the video. Building on their dynamic visuals for the last few Bon Jovi tours, Performance Environment Design Group (PEDG) and Spike Brant have taken advantage of a convergence of new technologies and a few innovative companies to realize their most ambitious design to date.

Hilton Worldwide’s ONE: Full Service Summit Tradeshow, held from April 29 through May 1, 2013 at the Hilton Anatole in Dallas, TX, brought together general managers and sales directors for three of Hilton’s full-service hotel brands — Hilton Hotels & Resorts, DoubleTree and Embassy Suites.

For Miranda Lambert, “it’s all about taking this rock persona of hers and running with it,” says LD Chris Lisle of the Nashville star’s current Locked and Reloaded tour with Dierks Bentley, a sequel of sorts to the Lambert/Bentley Locked and Loaded co-headlining tour of 2006/2007. “I tell everyone she’s a rock star,” he says. “That little five foot four gal just explodes on stage, making her fun to light.”

Since its reportedly shaky start back in Oct. 1999, the Coachella Music and Arts Festival, staged by concert promoter Goldenvoice, is now on solid financial ground. Tickets for this year’s first weekend of events, held April 12-14, not only sold out, they were gone within 20 minutes. Three-day passes for the second weekend, April 19-21, sold out as well, in little more than a day.

For more than a decade, The Killers have been pumping out hard-driving, danceable and emotionally-charged rock music, with glimmers of techno pop. Through his eight years (and counting) as a member of the band’s production team, lighting designer/director Steven Douglas has kept the visuals as fresh as the music.

When the clock ticked down to 00:00 at the end of the first half of Super Bowl XLVII, more than 700 people began a well-choreographed and meticulously rehearsed process to get the Pepsi Super Bowl XLVII Halftime Show onto the field. In under eight-minutes, the field was transformed into a fully realized concert spectacular. Beyoncé, along with a reunion of Destiny’s Child, entertained the 75,000+ football fans in the stadium and over 108 million people watching worldwide. Twelve minutes later, the field was just as quickly cleared and the game resumed. (Okay, for only a short time before an unscheduled break, but that is not our industry’s story to tell.)

There are two things that you need to know about lighting the Grammy Awards, the 55th annual edition of which was telecast on CBS Feb. 10 from the cavernous Staples Center in downtown Los Angeles. First, even though the venue holds nearly 20,000 when seating can be extended to include the floor (it’s less than half that for basketball and hockey — it’s a big floor), and the first 20 rows on that floor hold the crème de la crème of the music industry, the show isn’t about them. Rather, it’s about the 28.37 million or so pairs of eyeballs that the show drew this year, some of which will buy recordings that they might not otherwise have. The camera adds ten pounds and 10 million units of sales. On a less pecuniary level, it’s also about presenting a record industry as robust, creative and vital despite concerns about losses to piracy, a bad economy and growing consumer ennui.

Dodd Technologies Supports InterVarsity’s Big Year-End Conference
It’s a concert. It’s a church. It’s a theater. It’s an intimate space that takes up half a football dome. It’s Urbana, a collegiate Christian mission conference staged in St. Louis’ Edward Jones Dome the last week of December. Close to 16,000 college-age men and women participated — some dressed for church, most in hoodies and jeans — attending up to seven hours each day over a five-day span for a mix of entertainment, information and spiritual inspiration.

Adam Young, the mastermind of electronic-pop band Owl City (OC), began writing and recording music in his parents’ Owatonna, MN, basement to combat his insomnia, and the cover art for his two most recent albums — as well as his tour visuals — have a dream-like quality that seems well-aligned with his bright, fantasy-infused and often uplifting music.

The Red Hot Chili Peppers are in the midst of their I’m With You world tour, currently in North America before heading down under in early 2013. The band is bringing their iconic style and sound to audiences in a show that is visual and energetic; capturing their punk roots and off-the-cuff spontaneity in an effortless manner. That “kinetic effortlessness” is, of course, anything but effortless. But the creative team has crafted a stage set, video environment and lighting approach that fits the band perfectly. The team includes United Visual Artists, with Chris Bird taking the lead as the production designer and  Scott Holthaus of Happy Machine as the lighting designer. Leif Dixon is the screen director/operator, and the video director is George Elizondo of PRG Nocturne.