Carrie Underwood recently co-headlined with fellow Bandit client and country music star, Keith Urban. Award-winning lighting designer, Seth Jackson designed Underwood's rig so that it could coexist with Urban's set. Unlike most co-headline tours, Underwood was joining a production that was already on the road. Designed by Marc Brickman, the Urban show had a specific layout and lighting choices that Jackson said he needed to integrate with.
"After many phone calls, Marc and I got together with Chris Nyfield from Hindsight Studios and put both shows together in several 3D models so we could combine all of the elements together into a realistic production. The goal was to give each artist a unique experience and still fit into the trucks and get in and out of the buildings every day," Jackson explained. "Fortunately, most of the fixture choices matched my own choices, so the integration was fairly simple."
"Thanks to the team at Bandit Lites, we were able to engineer a system that would utilize fixtures that were labeled as "universal" and fixtures that were dedicated to "Carrie solo" and "Urban." The result worked," Jackson commented. "We used the same crew for both, used many of the same lights, and carried additional equipment that we only used on the Carrie dates."
Urban's show was based on an enormous LED wall and vast array of vertical towers and low-side light. Jackson chose to go the other direction. He built a show around articulating pods, loaded with VL2500 spots and lasers (Eric Pearce at SGPS designed the pods, Howard Ungerleider and PDI supplied the laser system and a softLED curtain). The cueing was intensive and complex.
"The funny thing is that I was trying to create a show that was very much a homage to the types of shows that Brickman created in the 80s and 90s, to then marry to the design style that he was doing on Keith Urban," Jackson added.
Equipment included Vari*Lite 3500 and 2500 Spots, Syncrolite MX3000s, Element Labs Versa Tubes, and Lycian M2 Truss Spots. Lighting was controlled by a Grand MA and Grand MA NSP.
(Jim Evans)
