Chauvet 4Wall rig lights Daddy Yankee farewell
- Details
It was a moment that no one in the packed arena is ever likely to forget, which is precisely what the Playground team of Curtis Adams (show and creative director); Trevor Ahlstrand (production designer); and Sooner Routhier (production designer), aspired to achieve when they collaborated on the show.
Working with lighting programmers Will Flavin and Dane Kick and drawing on the power of a 4Wall Entertainment supplied rig that featured over 500 Chauvet Professional fixtures, the designers captured the essence of one of the music industry’s most influential careers.
“To make the entire design cohesive, we were inspired by the shape of the language within Daddy Yankee’s branding and career, which gave us an incredibly fun playground to dream within,” said Adams. “Daddy Yankee asked us for his biggest show yet, so we were driven to discover ways to engineer the performance space creatively and artistically.”
Added Routhier: “Given that these were the final shows of Daddy Yankee’s career, we were tasked with creating his biggest arena production ever. Our design spanned the entire arena, allowing the audience to feel totally immersed in the show.”
In keeping with their goal, the design team wanted to avoid flat video walls, believing that they would be too limiting. Instead, they focused on creating an environment that drew on all production elements. Wrapping the video screen around the stage allowed them to maximize space, while developing new depth for visuals and the performance. This larger-than-life design was not only captivating in person, but it also delivered a stunning experience for the cameras.
Ahlstrand elaborated on how the team created this massive, multi-layered rig. “We viewed the rig as multiple systems or areas of lighting, sometimes each with a few fixture types,” he explained. “We had our B-stage where we started the show with embedded LED as well as hybrids surrounding the stage. Our audience towers contained both strobes and profiles. There were also pods over the stage with more hybrids and linear LED units, as well as floor lights with profiles and strobes for the band and dancers. Finally, our back wall possessed a lot of visual fire power with all the vertical LED bars, horizontal profiles, and many more strobes.”
The visual power of the large, deeply textured rig, which had an upstage video wall trimmed at 57ft from the arena floor, came into full play at the magical moment when the Daddy Yankee bust appeared.
Elaborating on this moment in the show, Adams noted: “La Meta is a celebration of Daddy Yankee's career, chronologically highlighting each of his eras, and the evolution of reggaeton. In our fourth act, we cement his status as the G.O.A.T. with a massive stone bust of him coming out of the stage. This was engineered by Matthew Whitehead and his talented team at AirWorks.”
Making a key contribution to the entire show were the rig’s 192 Color STRIKE M fixtures, some of which were used as side lights and on an upstage row for dance light, as well as for slow motion effects. Other units of the motorized strobe-wash were positioned behind the video screen, while the remainder lined two sides of each audience tower to provide crowd lighting as well as visual sweeps.
Adding to the rig’s firepower were 313 COLORado PXL Bar 16 fixtures. “We used them as vertical towers to shine through the screen going as tall and as wide as we possibly could in the venue,” Ahlstrand said of the motorized battens. “This gave us a huge matrix of pixels to visually accent the music both vertically and horizontally throughout the show. Will and Dane both were able to create very dynamic and unique effects without the looks ever feeling repetitive.”
Rounding out the Chauvet Professional fixtures in the rig were 12 Maverick Storm 4 Profiles. Placed on the deck, these fixtures created floor effects.
