As the old saying goes, too many cooks spoil the broth. But for Post Malone’s ‘If Y’all Weren’t Here, I’d Be Crying’ tour, his first trek with a live band, the opposite was true. This complex production had to go from “start to rehearsal load-in in just over a month—a very tight turnaround for sure,” according to Production & Lighting Designer Dan Norman. So Norman reached out and worked with a long list of collaborators.
Matt Steinbrenner, Production Designer for the 2023 MTV Video Music Awards, shared some insights on the interesting visual twist to MTV’s iconic Moon Person helmet on stage at Prudential Center in Newark, NJ on Sept. 12, and as it turns out, the core idea wasn’t as much about sight as it was about sound. “The idea that I came up with was, ‘Okay, let’s take this helmet and imagine that sound waves could be so intense that they would etch into and carve out a new image on the surfaces of the Moon Person.’ That’s what really brought about all the horizontal striations that wrapped around the form and sliced through it in a kind of interesting way. Then that gave us the chance on the visor, which was all mirrored in chrome, to create banding that had open space in between.”
For Shania Twain’s ‘Queen of Me’ tour, Lighting Designer André Petrus worked with Production Designer Cory FitzGerald to carefully highlight the artist as she performs in an immersive environment packed with 3D animations. “She wanted to feel immersed in the content, so we carry an LED floor and LED I-Mag screens; the entire show feels totally enveloping,” Petrus says.
Designer Michael Apostolos, Principal of Chicago-based Fourline Creative, served as Production and Lighting Designer for Chance The Rapper’s series of one-off shows celebrating the 10th anniversary of his 2013 breakthrough mixtape “Acid Rap.” These included a homecoming show at the United Center in Chicago, followed by nights at Brooklyn’s Barclays Center and Los Angeles’ Kia Forum. Apostolos described the essence of his design, which includes providing the artist with “a single spotlight that just allows him to be there, raw in his emotions, close to the audience so they can feel like they’re a part of that moment.”
Lainey Wilson, CMA Female Vocalist of the Year and New Artist of the Year and ACM’s New Female Artist of the Year, is known for her signature Bell Bottom Country aesthetic. “It’s an amazing camp to work with,” says Andrew Sparks, President of PTP Live and Account Manager for Wilson’s first headlining tour, which kicked off this summer. And as head of PTP, which stands for Production Technology Partners, Sparks emphasizes the importance of the “partner” part. “They’re understanding, they love new ideas; they’re everything you would ever want out of a client. It’s a partnership,” he says.
With minimal time on-site to rehearse the lighting and laser effects accompanying the grand finale for the fireworks spectacle that wrapped up the orchestral music celebrating Belgian National Day 2023—and no time at all to synch the visuals with the fireworks themselves—Painting with Light relied on previz software to ensure that the 15-minute finale would have maximum impact for the 60,000+ onsite attendees and huge broadcast audience.
There’s a rumor going around that Warner Brothers’ summer blockbuster, ‘Barbie,’ was made with no VFX. Phil Galler, President of Lux Machina, would beg to differ. “Yes, there are definitely lots of practical elements in the set,” he says, but notes that “there were upwards of 1,000 VFX shots in this movie.” Lux Machina, which worked directly with the VFX team, supplied about 40 of the robust media servers that the company has been developing—Lux Arca Servers—to feed content to the LED volume and support the film’s virtual production workflow.
ImageSFX’s Doug Adams describes the core vision requested by Scott Holthaus, Production/Lighting Designer for Disturbed’s ‘Take Back Your Life’ tour as “a constantly moving truss of flames” using the company’s FireSnakes. While many would dismiss the whole idea as crazy, Adams and others on the ImageSFX team spent close to two months working on an overlapping pyro and truss system that would provide the desired looks—summed up by Disturbed’s Draiman as ‘sick’—while also ensuring that the flames wouldn’t melt the lighting fixtures or set the venue on fire.
Amish Dani’s company, FRAMEWORX, was able to execute the Peso Pluma ‘Doble P’ tour in less than four weeks from phone call to opening night—an incredibly brief span of time. Two of those weeks were spent entirely on conceptualization, before a single piece of gear was pulled.
Ha Hau, Manager & Field Production Designer for ILLENIUM’s Trilogy:Colorado concert at Denver’s Empower Field (formerly Mile High Stadium), shared some insights on how video and pyro can be used to draw everyone’s attention at stadium-sized concerts into the emotional flow of a stadium-sized show—even for those in the nosebleed section. “These venues are not meant for concerts, they’re meant for football where you watch everything on the field,” he said. “When it comes to a concert, you see everything at one end for the most part. I wanted to take advantage of having the field and make it part of the visual aspect. When you have the nosebleed seats, the seats are so high and watching everything happen at one end of the field of the stage is not as immersive. So, I wanted to create an immersive experience from the field for the people that are up high.”
Dan Braun, Creative Director/Production Designer for Metallica, spoke to PLSN about the deceptively spare look to the band’s 66-truck M72 World Tour. “All of that is the paradox that is Metallica,” he said, achieved by pushing back on naysayer pushback and getting the proportions of everything just right. “One of the things that I pride myself on is trying to make the room feel intimate; to make it feel small. The first review I read of this show called it cozy, that somehow we’d made a stadium cozy. We have changed the experience of a show in an 80,000 seat stadium.”
It’s one thing to light a show or exhibit for a seated audience with a fixed point of view. But how do you support a visual narrative when viewers aren’t stationary? That was a key consideration for the designers featured in PLSN’s August 2023 issue for both the BOSTON 365 attraction atop the city’s Prudential Center and Broadway’s Here Lies Love. PLSN details how the visual designs from Lightborne (BOSTON 365) and Here Lies Love designers David Korins (Scenic), Justin Townsend (Lighting), and Peter Nigrini (Projection) optimize the “wow” factor for all those roving eyeballs.