Five-time platinum artist Ruel’s hugely anticipated 4th Wall World Tour lit up stages in Brisbane, Adelaide, Melbourne, Sydney, Fremantle, Auckland and Wellington.
Since making his debut in 2017 when he was just fourteen, the London-born, Sydney-raised artist has fast become one of his generation’s most influential musicians. Sitting with over 2 billion global streams and 1.2 million Instagram followers, the pop sensation also holds groundbreaking records as the youngest artist ever to win Breakthrough Artist at the ARIA Awards and as the youngest musician to sell out the Sydney Opera House… twice.
Dave McMahon from DJM Creative designed the lighting saying that Nate, Ruel’s manager, and Jeremy Koren, Ruel’s Creative Director, had a clear vision for what they wanted for this show.
“Playing off the theme of the 4th Wall album, the show was structured like a movie,” he explained. “There are a lot of key video interaction moments, with an opening and closing credit sequence, as well as recurring story elements such as Ruel’s pay phone.
“There were tracks within the set that I was designing purely to support the video and performance elements and had complete creative freedom on others such as Younger or Flames.”
Ruel has a large variety of songs in the set ranging from ballads, pop bangers to dance tracks so Dave wanted to pull out an equally large variety of looks, giving each track a very unique style whilst staying cohesive throughout the set.
With such a large variety of performance venues delivering a consistent show at all locations was a key part of the design process. The show needed to scale to fit Hindley Street Music Hall and Sydney’s Aware Super Theatre without losing any of the performance or video interaction moments
“I chose to go with a simple Profile/Wash/Strobe/Blinder combination,” said Dave. “This gave me an easy time cloning into all my different rigs. The spec was Robe Megapointes or Ayrton Eurus profiles, GLP JDC1s and Claypaky K20, Martin MAC Quantums or Robe Spiiders for our wash.”
On this run, different suppliers were used at every location. The largest shows were supplied by ei Productions/The MusicBox in Sydney and Phaseshift/WooHah in Melbourne.
“We had GLP JDC1s distributed throughout the roof and the multilayered staging, the profiles were located on the upstage floor for the punchy rear lighting or breakup looks and a standard distribution of all the fixtures through the roof rig,” added Dave.
Dave also used zactrack for the first two shows of the tour.
Dave ran an MA Lighting MA3 Fullsize in MA2 mode with a custom-built resolume rack to run video. This show was fully timecoded and with a lot of original arrangements, a lot of time was spent in rehearsals with the band making sure the show was super tight.
“Beau, the Musical Director for the show, was fantastic with supplying me with the tracks after every unique change, which there were lots of,” remarked Dave. “Having such a talented and tight band, there was a lot of parts within the music I was able to play from.”
The whole stage was turned into an outdoor setting, with turf and faux foliage covering the entire stage except for the road strip down the middle. A catwalk and a multilayered staging setup gave Ruel the space to explore the stage and have a lot of unique performance moments. There was also a 4m tree and a phone booth.
The show is very video focussed with the video content being custom-made by Nate and his team of creatives (Jeremy Koren, Taka Perry, Snapshot Bam and Minh Nguyen). A 12x4m 4K custom screen was flush with the top of our riser package.
“It’s been amazing to start working with this team of people,” concluded Dave. “There hasn’t been a dull moment on the run. Every single member of the crew and band is incredible at what they do as well as being fantastic people. The challenging moments were made easy by this fantastic team.”
Photos: Michelle Grace Hunder
