Production Profile

Just because they’re “weekend warriors,” as production manager Sean Gary humorously calls them, doesn’t mean that edgy country music veteran Gary Allan and his band and crew are not busier than a cat on fire. They spend most weekends of the year headlining in clubs, casinos, parks, theaters, rodeos, auto auctions, hockey arenas and festivals in seemingly every corner of the country. If you were to draw lines on a map between Allan’s gigs, your diagram would look like a ball of twine that had exploded from within.

It was conveyed to us that Sting and Paul did not want two [separate] shows — they wanted one,” states Richard Locklin, LD for Paul Simon. “We needed the show to be seamless, moving nicely from one song to another without stopping the show to move set pieces.”

Mission accomplished.

It started with a scanned drawing of trees with eyes. “We want trees onstage,” said the band members of Las Vegas-based Imagine Dragons. Production designer/LD Richard “Nook” Schoenfeld of Visual Ventures Design was one of three designers approached to turn the scan into an imaginative set for the last portion of their Night Visions tour, dubbed Into the Night.

A look at the lighting, video and pyro for The Pepsi Super Bowl XLVIII Halftime Show

This year’s Super Bowl was held in MetLife Stadium, located in East Rutherford, NJ. It was the first — and many on the crew hope the last — cold weather Super Bowl in a stadium without a roof. To pull off the potentially cold and snowy Pepsi Super Bowl XLVIII Halftime Show with Bruno Mars and his band along with special guest, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, it took a lot of pre-planning. Known for high tech lighting and video, the show’s core technology is not exactly comprised of gear that loves cold temperatures, much less Arctic conditions.

You’ve never seen country music performances quite like these. Then, again, you’ve never seen a country music award show quite like this, either. The fourth annual American Country Awards (ACA) gala, telecast live from Las Vegas’ Mandalay Bay Event Center Dec. 10, 2013, pushed the envelope in many, if not all, directions.

Well beyond his boy band days in ‘N Sync, actor/singer/dancer Justin Timberlake has emerged as one of the most versatile stars of his generation. Following a nearly six-year hiatus from music to focus on his acting career, Timberlake was back in the studio and on stage in a big way in 2013 with two album releases and two high-profile tours.

For Krewella, a fast-rising EDM act that toured this fall in support of their new album, Get Wet, sisters/vocalists/DJs Jahan and Yasmine Yousaf and producer/DJ Kris “Rain Man” Trindl have generated significant buzz with a sparkling Plexiglas crystal “volcano.”

Nine Inch Nails’ 2013 Tension tour, in support of NIN’s Hesitation Marks album, fuses artistry with technology and lighting with video. Frontman Trent Reznor teamed once again with art director Rob Sheridan and production designer/LD LeRoy Bennett for another tour de force production.

Metallica: Through the Never merges both the concert and dramatic narrative genres into a feature film with visually stunning results. The Picturehouse Entertainment film is an unusual hybrid that reflects the band’s “go big or go home” style. Even the release of the movie was unique as it first opened exclusively in 3D IMAX in the U.S. before going to wide release a week later. Directed by Nimród Antal, who also co-wrote the script with Metallica, the dramatic portions of the story are interwoven with a Metallica concert that, literally at times, bleeds together for a dark visual feast based on the band’s hardcore metal music.

Right up there with “jumbo shrimp” and “army intelligence,” the phrase “arena intimacy” appears to be an oxymoron of head-scratching proportion. Yet this skeptic was won over one Saturday night in September when Michael Bublé’s To Be Loved tour stopped to play St. Louis’ Scottrade Center.

Decades ago, Steven Wilson used to create private home recordings and let them out to the public, passing them off as long-lost relics of Britain’s psychedelic era. Fomenting a campaign of subterfuge and misdirection, Wilson adopted the seemingly meaningless moniker Porcupine Tree (PT) for his studio inventions and even credited fictional characters with having performed on “the band’s” early releases.