HAMBURG – What you see is not always what it appears to be. This timeless reality check can make things a bit uncertain at times, but on the flip side, it can also lead to some wonderfully surprising moments. Such was the case with the production design that Rob Lister and his team at IYA created for the recently completed KORN world tour. 

With its towering trim and floating automated light pods, the tour’s production immersed and captivated fans on a multitude of levels, but though the show was majestic, the underlying lighting element behind it was straightforward, according to Thomas “Church” Christmann of CycoVision.

Christmann was in a great position to know– he was the programmer and LD for the tour, powering his show with a ChamSys MagicQ MQ500M+ Stadium console. “Rob and the IYA team did an incredible job,” he said. “They gave me all the freedom to program the show throughout, which was great fun. As for the basic structure of the show, in terms of lighting, it was straight and basic.  However, with all the lasers and pixel lines involved, the end result was actually very complex. We did a great deal of video mapping on the lighting fixtures.”

Often running lighting fixtures as video surfaces and using his PRG-supplied lighting rig to run through myriad colors and beam angles Christmann conjured up deeply evocative looks that belied the relatively limited number of fixtures in the production. 

“So, the show itself , if you’re talking about just our setup,  was over 100 universes, which may sound weird, because we weren’t using that much equipment,” he explained. “However, we were doing a lot of video mapping, and all these fixtures were in the highest mode so we could have the best pixel pitch on them. We wanted to map every pixel they provided. This ate up a lot of universes, because I merged the server universes in my ChamSys console to the fixtures. So, that kind of doubled up the universes we used. 

“The lasers in our rig also used a lot of universes per unit,” continued Christmann. “There were six lasers-outs per stick and eight laser bars per pod. In total it was about 400 Laser outputs. So that gave us another 40 universes. But considering everything together it was about 125 universes plus the local universes. I also left 100 universes open for festivals.  You never know these festivals kind of go crazy sometimes, so I want to have enough spare universes.”

Given the number of universes his rig demanded, Christmann was happy to have a powerful console like the MagicQ MQ500M+ at his disposal. “Capacity was the most important thing to me,” he said. “I had 400 DMX universes output out of the box for the production. So, it was easy for me to set ranges and put everything so far away without any trouble. I had to work with all the different house rigs on the tour, some of which could be quite large. I could go very big in terms of universes and keep my patch and build clean and easy.

“We ran two different protocols: Art-Net and sACN, continued Christmann. “In the end, I was connected to lighting, the lasers and video, because the video got merged in my console. There were 40-watt lasers on the floor that I was controlling over the Pangolin system. I was still connected to the console, which was running the laser batten because there must be a laser tech with the right knowledge, since the lasers are so strong.”

Christmann preprogrammed all the basics of his show with Visualizer beforehand, and then had a couple of rehearsal days with just the floor package on the eve of the tour. “I just had the rest of the lights on my Visualiser at that point,’ he said. ‘That worked well with ChamSys because it supports all the Art-Net or sACN outputs. I can do this right out of the box — no surfaces necessary.”

Although the show was preprogrammed (but not timecoded), Christmann lent his widely celebrated busking skills to every song at various points, infusing them with a greater sense of spontaneity. The user-friendly nature of his console was greatly appreciated at these moments.

“A big reason why I like to work with this console is because it is so intuitive,” he said. It’s always easy to go from A to B. I started to change my shows into group cues. So every time something changed, I just changed my group and it worked. Also, bringing the lights from the festival rigs into my show was super simple. I just morphed or created new groups.”

Of course, there was much more than a man and his machine behind this show. Teamwork with talented collaborators was also critically important. Preproduction support by Stefan Gunkel played a big role, as did the work of TM Matt Peloquin; PM Syrus Peters and production assistant Talena Rose; Stage Manager Danny Monsees and assistant Jake Hogeland; LX Crew Chief Greg Nunz with crew Jason Henry, Olu Kiara and Eddi Viveros; laser operator Eric Baum and tech Chad Timinskis; and video operator Marco Hernandez. 

Having so many people involved behind the scenes in a show might have been a surprise to many fans who could have felt that the smoothly run production just happened by itself. But then, as this tour demonstrated, things are not always exactly what they seem.

NEW YORK – It isn’t simply what you see, but what you feel like you’re seeing that creates the kind of transcendent experience that takes a lighting design to the next level. James McKenna created just such a design for KMFDM on the multi-national industrial rock icons 15-city USA tour.

For starters there was some arresting imagery that evoked the feeling of an automation effect, with dramatic 3D-like movements. McKenna created this magic, not with automations, but by displaying overlapping effects through his strobe-hybrids, controlling them with a ChamSys MagicQ MQ500M Stadium Console, which like his entire rig, was supplied by R90 Lighting.

“Every fixture on this design was pixel mapped in my ChamSys desk,” said McKenna. “The automation effect or glitching that people see in the backdrop is a result of running effects through the Pixel Mapper. Additionally, to make it super glitchy, I’ll add the strobe from the pixel mapper into it. This seems to cause it to wig out in a fun way that looks like malfunctioning video screens in a sci fi flick.”

McKenna extended this mesmerizing sense of motion beyond his backdrop and sprinkled it throughout his entire design, which featured a heavy representation of vertically oriented fixtures. “It’s easier to pixel map with the vertical fixtures,” he explained. “But honestly, the primary reason, is mobility. The entire rig has to break down and pack in a 16-foot trailer along with the backline and merch. Pipe and base is quick and dirty and with everything on wheels, having a couple pipes on wheels meant I only had a single column mount point. So, vertical was the way to go.”

Mobility was not the only priority for McKenna on this tour. He also needed a high degree of flexibility, as he had to adapt to a different set list every night with scant advance notice. He lit 15 shows on the tour, each one drawing on a library of 40 different songs, with no set ever repeated.

“I would learn of the set during sound check around 4pm the night of the show,” he said. “This left me about two hours before doors to touch up programming for the selected tracks of the night. It created for some nail biting on occasion. Additionally, when we left for the tour, I had only programmed 16 of the tracks due to time constraints, so I was having to program the remaining tracks during the drives.”

“It was stressful at times,” continued McKenna. “The biggest challenge was adapting the show to each venue’s house rig on the fly. When I initially programmed the show in Capture, I added a number of “house rig” fixtures to program in as well. This show was the first time I’ve really utilized the Group Cues feature in ChamSys, which made expanding and adapting my show on the fly a breeze for the most part.”

This feature allowed McKenna to make his show larger each night than he would have been able to do had he been required to build the rig and then program in the house rig each night. Instead of working through this time-consuming process, he was able to clone/morph, and simply set positions and set focuses for gobos and other effects.

About 40-percent of McKenna’s show was of busked. The rest was run cue to cue using his ChamSys console’s Cue Stacks. “I had my upper bank flash keys as well as the 12-key Execute Keys as flash keys, so I could hit a number of effects on the fly,” he said. “I set base looks for the songs (intro, verse, chorus, bridge, etc.). Then I assigned lights to synth lines or other stand-out elements of songs — and then triggered those live as they happened. I get bored easily, so I always need to do something. I refuse to timecode the show. I make it more complicated than it needs to be, but I find it enjoyable to play along with the songs. I think it adds a live element as well. Time code shows are too perfect. The band is playing live, and I feel the show should reflect that as well.”

McKenna found the Group Cues and Group Grids on his MQ500M especially valuable on this tour. He says that The Group Cues made expanding and morphing his show “a breeze.” As for the Group Grids, he notes that they “made pixel mapping even easier. I didn’t have to stop to fine tune my Pixel Mapper FX to try and match the BPM; instead, I could actually assign it a time via the FX engine.”

A self-described “button masher,” McKenna relished working the buttons on his user-friendly console. “I can’t play an instrument,” he acknowledged. “But I can mash buttons in time, so close enough, right? The MQ500M has plenty of buttons for me to assign things to for future mashing purposes.”

Deftly mashing those buttons, McKenna played his “instrument” to perfection. In so doing, he created a lightshow that, like the music of his clients, created a magical experience by defying expectations.

BROOKLYN, NY – Ed Warren could see that the fans in front of him were really tuned into the two Four Tet shows he lit in Brooklyn at the start of this summer.

That was a given. Less certain though, was whether or not the people above the acclaimed British lighting designer had any idea what he or his famous client were doing! That’s because Four Tet and Warren were 100-feet below the long and very busy Kosciuszko Bridge (affectionately known as the “K Bridge”) when they were busy doing what they love – and are really good at.

“I must admit, it was different doing a show underneath such a busy overpass,” said Warren. “We really couldn’t tell at all what was going on above us. I wonder if anyone above could tell what was going on with us below?”

Given the height and design of the much traversed (34,000 vehicles a day) bridge, that connects parts of Brooklyn and Queens, those passing overhead were oblivious to what Warren and his friends were up to down below in the recently opened K Bridge Park.

Such a shame! Since the two-day festival featured a brilliant mix of EDM music in all its glorious forms by Four Tet and twenty artists he selected to be a part of his curated event.

Warren lit Four Tet’s two main stage sets – one on Saturday late, the other Sunday afternoon into evening, using his ChamSys MagicQ MQ500M Stadium Console.

Shawn Bunch and Rishi Guinness ran the other shows on MagicQ MQ-80 Compact Lighting Consoles with Wings, while See Factor’s Alban Sardzinski handled production on the B stage. All the consoles at the festival, as well as the lighting rig, were supplied by See Factor, working with Highlt PDS (design and drafting studio) GreeNow (power and generators) Firehouse Productions (Flex one audio), and Gravity Productions (festival production management).

For the Four Tet show that he designed, Warren turned the park under the double-spanned bridge into kaleidoscopic wonderland of rapidly-moving reflective light and gobo patterns right there in a converted industrial site at the border of two New York boroughs.

As is his custom, Warren made mirror balls an integral part of this design. “We had four mirror balls positioned around the circular truss above the stage,” he said. “There were also four pillars holding up the bridge. We rigged circular trusses around them as well, so in total we had eight above the dancefloor and four above the stage.”

As for the gobo looks that were so exciting in his show, Warren noted: “I don’t often use them much, but they were a good way to break up the show a little. We called upon them at the more relaxed gentle parts of the set before it went hard again – ‘Recovery Gobos,’ if you will.”

In addition to the intuitive, user-friendly layout of his ChamSys console and its step-saving Timeline feature, Warren found the Group FX feature to be particularly important at Under The K Bridge.

“I used a Show File from a previous Four Tet show with a not too dissimilar setup, so Group Cues and Group FX made changing the show to this configuration go very smoothly. Absolutely, without a doubt, with Group Cues, moving from one show to another has never been easier!”

Looking at the overall show, See Factor’s Alban Sardzinski said: “This was a very unique canvas to work with. It allowed some incredible looks to be created. The ability with ChamSys to busk fast, and drive 90 pixel bars and lights without limitations was a big contributor the making this a special event for everyone.”