Eric Church returns to touring with BlackTrax
- Details
While The Gather Again tour shows take place in arena-sized venues, the stage is set up in an intimate, in-the-round style where the audience surrounds the performer from all sides. It’s a setup that needed a brand-new stage from the ones that Eric’s used to performing on for prior tours.
The design brief mandated that 64 automated follow spots (Robe BMFLs) simultaneously tracked the eight different targets; eight fixtures allocated per target. Butch Allen, the show’s production designer, worked very closely with TAIT (Staging and automation vendor for the tour) to develop a new flying camera system, now called the Navigator Camera System. BlackTrax sends positional information to TAIT via RTTRP-M so the flying cameras can automatically track Eric Church in real-time.
Throughout the show, the Navigator Camera System flies the length of the arena, capturing a 360º view of the stage and the audience surrounding the stage while also tracking the performers via BlackTrax. The results are stunning, and many of the shots and moves would be impossible to execute without the help of BlackTrax.
The Gather Again Tour was already an extensive and complicated production, and this took it up a notch.
“We love working with BlackTrax. What it adds to the show is so far beyond any other spotlight / automated key light system I've ever seen. The whole team was surprised by the degree of accuracy. In the preliminary talks, we thought ‘millimeter’ accuracy was a marketing ploy. It was not. I've never seen anything in entertainment lighting this precise,” reports touring lighting director Gavin Lake.
Typically, Gavin dedicates two to three hours each show day to update key position focus' that can’t be left in the hands of a spotlight operator. Now he doesn’t have to worry about any of those, he has confidence the BlackTrax system is going to work.
The Eric Church Gather Again Tour has an extensive set up and tear-down regime, in addition to having a short window between weekend shows. The crew has limited time to get ready, to change the network, and they do it twice a weekend. Roth calls it ‘typical’, but it still requires an extensive amount of work noting the ability for the team to pivot, “seamless”, despite any obstacles met.
“Once we decided to use BlackTrax, the hardware support in terms of helping us detail the network, was 110%,” says Robert Roth, Christie Lites account executive. “The software support, same thing, the field technician we hired through the BlackTrax team, John Taylor, was a rock star. There was a time crunch across the whole show and the BlackTrax team integrated well, exceeded expectations and they did it in a short time frame with some logistics pressures. Very happy with the service.”
