Williams and Fisher took design inspiration from the original album artwork that had of a golden bust of Robbie Williams' head. The stadium tour included a 41' sculptural head coming out of a massive back video wall along with seven more enormous three-dimensional heads that moved around the stage. With so much automation, video, and larger than life scenery it was important that the lighting work with the overall production design in support of the artist's energetic performance style.
Being a summer stadium tour posed some challenges, not the least of which was the lack of darkness for a good portion of the show. "The biggest issue was knowing that we would be playing in Northern Europe during mid-Summer," explained Williams. "This is death for lighting and the worst thing a designer can do is carry on in denial of the fact that it's not going to get dark until 2/3 of the way into the show. In the spirit of turning a weakness into strength, I set about conceiving a show that would actually benefit from opening in daylight. I thought about outdoor entertainments that are invariably day lit-carnivals, parades, etc. From this I took the cue as to what kind of show we needed to design."
Williams' lighting was built into the set making the rig seem minimalistic, though it actually had quite a bit of gear hidden away on the enormous stage. The plot included 130 PRG Bad Boy spots, 138 Mac Auras, 69 Atomic Strobes with Color scrollers, 12 Big Lites, 12 Nova-Flowers along with additional lighting fixtures.
The PRG Bad Boys were the primary source because of their output, noted Williams, "In a stadium-never mind in daylight - it's all about intensity. None of the subtle features of a fixture count for anything at all if you can't see them so, in many ways the brightest fixture wins. The Bad Boy is still the brightest fixture in its price range. Even though we have a lot of fixtures, due to the scale, we have very few different types; it was a very simple rig, really."
Pre-rigging the lighting in some portions of the plot proved to be very efficient. This was particularly true for the band area roofette. PRG worked with Brilliant Stages so that 65 of the Mac Auras could be permanently mounted onto U-beam. All the cabling was hidden inside the U-beam, which then attached to the main structural beams of the roofette. It took only a half hour at load-in to attach the U-beams and plug it all together.
The selection of PRG BAT Truss for much of the rig also proved efficient. Production Manager Wob Roberts liked BAT Truss for the space it saved as well as the time, "The time it saved me was really impressive. My lighting crew moved so fast they ended up having to wait for the next staging, scenic, or video sections to be built so they could move on. The lighting pieces were so well pre-rigged that they went in extremely quickly. It was a very slick operation."
PRG provided the entire lighting package, under the control of senior account manager, Scottie Sanderson. "I knew that PRG could provide the gear," stated Roberts. "They have supported Robbie's shows for a long time and are great to work with. They also really came through with a great crewing solution for us. I have to say I was blessed with an entire crew that was great on every part of this tour. 90% of the success of any production is the people and I had the best team out there."
(Jim Evans)
