ALIA recently had the opportunity to catch up with Guy Sebastian’s Lighting Designer Brad Alcock who is currently on the road with Guy as part of his national T.R.U.T.H. Tour. Originally scheduled to tour in 2021, the recent lifting of restrictions Australia-wide finally allowed the tour to get underway in April 2022.
The lockdown period allowed Guy and the wider production team to spend a lot of time exploring every detail of the show. Brad commented that “Guy, who absolutely loves to tour, gets involved in all aspects of the creative process of putting together the show and as always, had a very clear vision of what he wanted to present on stage”.
It took five revisions of the concept together with Creative Director Mitchell Woodcock to finally arrive at a design that everyone was happy with. “It’s the highest number of concept revisions I’ve ever done for a show but it was an enjoyable process for me as I didn’t feel like it was all on my shoulders,” added Brad. Guy and his creative team have a very open relationship explained Brad, “there is a huge amount of mutual trust and all ideas are equally considered”.
For this tour, Brad explained that Guy really wanted to focus on the visuals for his songs and to focus on trying to visually communicate what he sees in his mind when he performs each song. To achieve this, required a huge collaborative effort from the whole team, including Natasha Jackson who created all of the content for the tour.
When it came to lighting the show, Brad’s brief from Mitchell was to make it look big, be sympathetic to the content and not be too distracting from the action on the screens. “The key point of the design, is that the visuals make the show, and I need to design the lighting with that in mind” explained Brad.
The lighting equipment and crew for the tour are supplied by Creative Productions. The rig primarily consists of Robe fixtures and includes 33 x Robe BMFL Spots, 20 x Robe Spiiders 24 x Robe Mega Pointe, 24 x Ayrton Magic Blades, 16 x GLP X4 Bar 20, 17 x GLP JDC1, 8 x Chroma Q Colour Force 48, 2 x MDG ATMe Hazers, 2 x DJ Power Low Foggers and lots of LED Neon truss accents.
Historically, Brad has been known in the industry as a staunch Hog user when it comes to lighting control and he surprised many by purchasing two grandMA3 consoles and an IO Node for this tour. Although his grandMA1 “Certified Operator” certificate from the 1990s hangs on his office wall, together with an original MA Scancommander console, Brad booted his new consoles into Mode 3 and started the journey to learn the MA3 platform.
So why the change? Brad believes that ETC’s decisions and lack of development over the past few years suggest the end of the Hog 4 product line. “On one hand, you have their new EOS Apex console which looks to have an incredible feature set and on the other hand, we are still waiting for the new colour picker on the Hog 4 to be released which was first demonstrated over half a decade ago,” remarked Brad.
Brad’s other reason is user base size and his COVID-19 continuity plan. “There are not many Hog 4 users left in Australia who could easily step in to operate an arena-sized show if I caught COVID and had to isolate, compared to grandMA operators. I actually spent a lot of time developing a COVID-19 continuity plan when it came to the console. I developed a “COVID-MODE” that allows for the console to effectively run the show itself with minimal input from a stand-in operator. Making extensive use of macros and MA3’s new timeline recording functionality, it is comforting to know that the autopilot button can be engaged should the worst-case scenario play out.”
Brad admitted that the transition to MA3 was a challenging one at times, but he was well supported by MA Lighting teams in Germany, Singapore and of course the entire Show Technology team here in Australia. “I don’t like to be distracted by a console as I prefer to concentrate on the stage and MA3 allows me to do this,” he added.
Guy’s T.R.U.T.H. tour continues throughout May and June before he brings his next project Higher Sounds to outdoor venues across Australia later in the year.
