As the long-time tour lighting designer, Lawrence Upton of UV Lighting was once again designing the lighting rig for the alternative rock band, and the co-headlining line-up with Marilyn Manson presented a set of challenges. Working with tour lighting provider DPS, Upton created a festival-type lighting rig complete with 24 VL4000 Spot luminaires from Philips Vari-Lite to give himself the creative freedom needed to surpass those challenges.
"Anytime you do a co-headlining tour you ramp things up a lot and as you get closer to the event people start to add more and more production elements," began Upton. "In the production design, we ended up with seven layers of fabrics hanging on stage at random widths and depths designed to allow us to create a different stage ambiance between the two headliners.
"The difficulty with this is that the fabrics blocked a lot of the light, so we had to approach the lighting from a festival-style mindset. We had to make sure we had the lighting capabilities of many types of fixtures throughout the rig and the VL4000 Spot luminaires gave us those capabilities to create the theatrical effects of the show."
Upton continued, "I had seen demos of the VL4000 Spot at some of the boutique tradeshows and then I also got to use them when Vari-Lite loaned fixtures to the Merriweather Post Pavilion for the M3 Rock Festival. That was the first time I used them in a real-world situation and there are so many features inside the Series 4000 fixtures that it's going to be a while before they are fully realized in the market for what they can do. People tend to stick to what they know, but when something comes along like the Vari-Lite Series 4000 fixtures, it's almost like they're ahead of their time.
"It's obvious that a lot of intellectual thought went into the design of the VL4000 Spot and it's a very useful tool," added Upton. "It allows a designer to push themselves creatively and in the end that's really what this business is all about."
(Jim Evans)
