The lighting and production team knew that as this was the first show at New Zealand’s national stadium Eden Park in Auckland, the design and the show itself needed to be large, iconic and unforgettable.
“This year for Six60 we have made a real effort to make the lighting and video as in tune with the band and the music as possible,” commented Ben Dalgleish, lighting designer with Human Person design production house. “In certain cases that meant no timecode, others a focus on interesting multi-camera Notch looks. All the video content was designed with this in mind also, using UV Mapping heavily to integrate live footage of the band within the content, not just on IMAG screens separately.”
The design for the band’s summer tour featured a fully open stage, 14m roof with a 26m wide LED screen. This was incredibly effective as it allowed for tickets to be sold as full view seating right the away around the stadiums on that run. The team had a similar goal for the Eden Park show, so a very open design with no side walls to the stage was a good starting point. One element that wasn’t possible on the summer tour was to cover the stage legs with LED so they really wanted to make sure that happened.
As they got into show week it was clear that the weather was going to be a factor, eventually raining out a full day of programming and rehearsal, leaving the team without any type of full run through with lighting and video before the show. Thankfully, during the show, it all came together relatively flawlessly!
“There were only five weeks from when the show was confirmed till the day,” said Ben. “While we had a ‘base’ of a show already, the much larger scale, new lighting, video and automation combined with adding pyro, dancers, military band and 60+ Kapa Haka members last minute really pushed everyone to their limit. On my end, it was trying to choreograph all the elements to end up with a cohesive, exciting show.”
The lighting was supplied by Spot-Light Systems, and featured pretty much their entire workshop! Over 250 Robe moving head fixtures; BMFL, MegaPointe, Tarrantula and 100LED Beam, plus Claypaky Sharpys, strobes and blinders for days.
Human Person provided the winches which were combined with Astera Titan Tubes in custom facades that were used in combination with truss automation provided by CP Solutions. In total, 11 lighting trusses were automated, expertly directed by Stephan Hedges and programmed by Craig and Munroe from CP.
“Credit must be given also to Leon Dalton our production manager for wrangling all the vendors in such a short amount of time while still maintaining the highest standard of delivery,” added Ben.
The base of the show was programmed in early 2021 for the band’s summer tour – so the basic cue stacks and timecode was in place. For this show Ben wanted to use the Robe Tarrantula on automation trusses, so a redesign of the lighting was in order.
“I also added five moving pods featuring 16 x 100Beams each, so programming these new elements became the major workload for Jade Fraser our lighting programmer and myself who managed to crush it all out in around four days working pretty much around the clock,” said Ben.
Also taken from the band’s summer tour was the ‘LED Mountain’ fabricated by Angus Muir Design. This simple but effective set-piece was in place for the first third of the show and became the ‘theme’ for this first chapter with all the content interacting with it.
Video wise, Ben’s goal was to take up the full width of the field with LED, and they ended up with over 550 sq metres of LED provided by Big Picture NZ. Media server wise they used two disguise GX2c and 1x GX2 – with a heavy amount of cameras (12) and Notch on the show, they needed firepower to drive the massive amount of LED.
One of the more unique features were the 12 metres high 5mm LED columns that featured a one-panel return to add to the 3D effect. These were specifically designed to mask the legs of the roof structure, which otherwise would have been fully exposed due to the open nature of the stage.
Ryan Sheppard out of Toronto, Canada was the Notch Designer and Evan Dilworth the media server programmer/operator. Wendy A’Bear directed the cameras for the show, with Matt Clode and his team directing and producing the live stream which also was broadcast live to all the Pacific Islands on national TV.
The other half of Human Person, Ian Valentine was responsible for conceptualizing and creating all the visual content for the show, and due to the large screen setup, the majority of the content needed to be re-rendered. Editor/Animator Ash Smith of Euphoric Co. was on site for four days creating content for all the last minute changes as well.
The band’s favourite song is a B-Side called Up There and Ben reports that there was a great moment when the singer Matiu changed a lyric in the song to mention ‘now we are playing at Eden Park’. At that second there was also an automation move, with the trusses travelling into an asymmetric position, while the Titan Tubes moved the opposite way.
“It was a great feeling to know that not only had the band achieved this massive goal but we were right there with them creating some pretty cool looks for this show!” concluded Ben.
Human Person is running full steam ahead with some exciting film/video shoot projects and Ben has some shows for Alison Wonderland in New Zealand before it’s back to Los Angeles for the summer.
Photos: Matt Clode
