Robe can Be Itself on Sheryl Crow tour
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Jeremy landed the gig after production manager Rick Purcell saw his designs for the current tour by Chicago alt-rockers Wilco and made Sheryl aware of his work. They and her management team all wanted a more theatrical presentation that was based on soft scenic elements.
This provided the starting point for the design, together with extensive discussions between Jeremy and the artist about how stage aesthetics related to the vibe and direction of her album. Lyrically, the new songs deal with a disconnect in relationships fuelled by excessive electronic communications and over-exposure through social and other media distracting from real interactions.
Sheryl wanted to create a regal performance space that looked to have become distressed over time while Jeremy was keen to work with Valerie Light and Infinite Scenic again - who made his Wilco forest set. After extensive brainstorming, all agreed on an old railway station as the environment, with gothic stained glass windows creating an archway to serve as a mid-stage portal, with a tunnel of rusty pipes trailing off into the distance behind.
Using coated gauze material for the stained glass and a selection of back-painting techniques on the tunnel backdrop allowed these surfaces to be back-lit to create dynamics and effects throughout the show.
The emphasis on the soft scenery also influenced Jeremy’s choice of lights which included the 22 x Spiiders and eight BMFL Spots amongst others.
The BMFLs were chosen for their “fabulous set-up for animating gobos” explained Jeremy, which does all the surface texturing of the portal windows and tunnel backdrop.
The dual animation discs, on their own, create a specific moiré effect which he thinks is “really stunning” and also rare in a moving light. Adding gobos in front of that and altering the focus creates many subtle patterns and movements. “Then you can take it up a step and add one of the two prisms and get an even greater array of effects,” he commented.
In this show, the BMFL’s primary role is texturing and grading rather than aerials and, with this in mind, he changed out some of the original gobos for custom patterns from Rosco and Apollo.”
He initially looked at the Spiiders for their pixel mapping capabilities and Kling-Net compatibility, however with only a 12 ft. section of available truck space … he also had to keep his fixture count to a minimum so every light on the rig has to give as much variation as possible.
He wanted to create movement in the backlight washes without necessarily having to rely on pan & tilt actions and he also wanted to do some colour and intensity effects that were not easily achievable via console programming, which is why he decided to integrate an ArKaos media server into the system.
The whole process of mapping and feeding media to the fixtures over Ethernet / Kling-Net “was simple to set up and works brilliantly for the show”.
Spiider has now become his new favourite LED wash light. “The colour is excellent all the way through the whites to pastels to saturates. The dimming is superb, especially when in tungsten emulation mode and the size weight and price are all very attractive.”
The biggest challenge so far on the tour has been keeping the fixture count down to a bare minimum, while having enough to light all the scenery and the band well and with plenty of variety. The entire rig fits into 12 ft. 3 inches of truck and thankfully the band uses in-ear monitors, so there’s no space taken up with wedge monitor cases, otherwise it might have been even less.
The show is running on a grandMA2 console programmed by himself and Megan Metcalf, with an ArKaos media server to pixel-map the Spiiders.
(Jim Evans)
