His secret? Switching from some standard lighting tools to over 100 pieces of Robe's smaller-brighter-lighter Robin series fixtures - Pointes, LEDBeam 100s and LEDWash 1200s... all supplied by VER in Los Angeles.
TSO's $20m-plus production has performed for more than 7m people in over 80 U.S. cities in the short duration of this leg of the tour (under seven weeks). Because of the show's popularity during the short holiday season, they created duplicate productions to simultaneously tour the East and West coasts of the country - both productions carrying matching rigs.
Hartley, show designer for the past 14 of TSO's 15 years (they didn't tour during their first year), operated lighting for the East Coast run, while LD Dan Cassar operated the same design on the West Coast. This hectic 2013 holiday schedule ran from 13 November through 30 December with each leg covering 60 shows in seven weeks - many cities with two shows per day.
Video projection, the set, the twice daily shows and the 'rigors of the road' all influenced Hartley's lighting design. He needed fixtures bright enough to hold up against an LED wall backdrop - surviving the ambient lighting from the video but also not drowning it out. He needed fixtures to cut through the layers of special effects including lasers, pyro and even snowflakes! He also needed the fixtures to produce some very specific colours.
The Robe equipment fulfilled all of Hartley's needs. For each tour, he chose 96 x Robin LEDBeam 100s, eight Robin LEDWash 1200s and eight Robin Pointes. "VER showed me a demo of various Robe fixtures and I liked those specific ones the best," he said.
"This year it's all designed around video projection, so I didn't need huge, heavy moving lights and went with the Robes, including the LED units.
"They are small with a good punch and dramatically reduced our truck space. We lost three trucks yet the show doesn't look smaller, it's just that I'm using more LEDs and compact fixtures like the Pointe."
This is the first time Hartley has used Robe fixtures, and he thanks his VER rep, Burton Tenenbein, for outstanding support and for "showing him the magic".
(Jim Evans)
