Production Profile

The 2012 MTV Video Music Awards moved into the 20,000-capacity Staples Center in Los Angeles this September where the design team took full advantage of the multi-purpose arena’s cavernous space. The VMAs show, which for the two previous years had been hosted at the 7,100-seat Nokia Theatre, always had a distinctive look, and this year’s edition was no exception.

By the end of “Girl Gone Wild,” the first song in Madonna’s MDNA tour, you know that this will be a concert experience unlike any before. More operatic in design style than pop concert, the creative team has married technology, music, and choreography with the precision and glamour that exemplifies the star herself. The MDNA tour opened in Israel in June and is currently touring North America.

As the wild-eyed flute-wielding frontman of Jethro Tull, Ian Anderson has often presented, with a hefty dose of camp, highly theatrical musical productions, and he’s been doing in over a span of 40 years. Whether through comic absurdity, interactive props, visual spectacle or dramatic flair, Anderson and Tull rarely disappoint audiences. So it shouldn’t come as a big surprise that Anderson has challenged himself, his band, his creative tech team and potential audiences once again by organizing his latest ambitious tour.

Not wanting to rest on their laurels, Global Creatures, the masterminds behind one of the highest-grossing tours of 2010, Walking with Dinosaurs, are once again amazing audiences and pushing the entertainment technology envelope. Having teamed up with DreamWorks Animation, they are now sending dragons soaring through arena skies and immersing audiences in the mythical Viking world of DreamWorks’ How To Train Your Dragon Live Spectacular.

There’s something primordial and mysterious — even psychedelic — happening in the forest. Laser beams cut through the wooded expanse and ricochet off 50-foot white pines sporting bounce mirrors, and artful lighting displays (some inspired by the symbolic designs inherent to Sacred Geometry) radiate throughout well-traveled and isolated locations of the woods.

A TV Lighting Crew Takes On the World’s Toughest Obstacle Course

Japanese TV has long featured contests where everyday people risk public humiliation for a chance at getting on national TV — picture 10 contestants in inflatable bowling pin costumes waddling away from a giant rolling ball. But Sasuke, or Ninja Warrior, a series of TV specials that first hit the airwaves in 1997, is different. These competitions focus more closely on each participant’s Ninja-like qualities: strength and agility.

Insomniac Events’ three-night, dusk-to-dawn Electric Daisy Carnival (EDC), drawing more than 300,000 to the Las Vegas Motor Speedway June 8-10, featured seven unique stages, live acts, more than 100 DJs, carnival rides, fire sculptures, large-scale artwork, nightly fireworks and laser displays and 500 costumed performers on stilts, funky bicycles and trampolines.

The head-spinning visuals for DJ Avicii’s LE7ELS tour start with a monumental set element — a giant head — flanked by large, organically-contoured “leaf-like” projection surfaces, all in front of a giant LED video wall.  Add in some nice beam and wash effects from the lighting rig, and you give one man with four mixing decks a way to deliver a two-hour dance experience for thousands of fans that’s altogether trippy, creative, energetic and bold.

As this issue went to press, Radiohead was reeling from the partial stage collapse on June 16 at Downsview Field in Toronto, which killed crew member Scott Johnson, injured three others and destroyed many of the lighting elements discussed in this Production Profile. In a statement, the band noted that, along with “the grief and shock ensuing from this terrible accident,” there were “practical considerations to deal with…The collapse also destroyed the light show; this show was unique and will take many weeks to replace.”

Visual, musical, physical, and — let’s face it — chemical stimuli, along with butt-moving bass-heavy grooves, have been the basic ingredients of the dance scene for decades. In recent years, DJs have begun to tinker with this intoxicating formula, and have sought to enhance and intensify the power of the club experience via elaborate lighting and video design.

Given the general state of the economy, these are hardly the best of times. But when you take a close look at the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Annual Festival, which was held in Indio, CA over two consecutive weekends in mid-April, it’s pretty obvious that they aren’t the worst of times, either.