Last year, lighting designer Zoe Spratling did a few tours/shows with Ice Nine Kills, an American heavy metal band from Boston, Massachusetts. The first tour of the year was a two-month run in the US, with a couple of festival dates scattered in there. Later in the year, they did another month-long American tour, but Zoe, unfortunately, was unavailable.
“I had my friend, Gabriel Osborn, running my show for me, and he absolutely killed it!” commented Zoe. “I did thankfully get to jump on for the last show of that run, which was part of their Silver Scream Convention, which was a lot of fun. We then played the When We Were Young festival along with a sideshow in Vegas for a weekend. Then, finally, we finished up the year with a Europe/UK tour ending in London’s Wembley Arena!”
Zoe says that she had no specific brief from the band; the only thing that she had to include was the double-screen “TV” look in the design. With the arena shows, she also had to include the band’s inflatable. Otherwise, the rest was up to her.
“The arena shows we ended our year with were the biggest headline shows Ice Nine Kills had done, and I wanted to reflect that in the design,” said Zoe. “It needed to be big, and I wanted to utilise different levels and heights to be able to showcase the band and actors better for such large rooms.”
Zoe’s biggest challenge was figuring out how to turn the theatre-sized production they had been running all year into an arena show. In their theatre shows, she used an “IX” logo made of Astera Titan and Helios tubes, mounted on a custom frame that was then secured to pipe and baseplates, so it stood free-standing behind our drummer. She needed to figure out how to incorporate that into the arena shows, since the Astera logo would be way too small.
“For the arenas, I used 30 Acme Pixel Lines and made the logo double the size of the theatre one,” Zoe explained. “I wanted to have it upright behind the drummer like I had been doing, but because the band wanted to use their inflatable, I decided to fly it dead centre instead.”
The rest of the main rig was made up of 85 x GLP JDC-1 strobes, which were used as the flown wash, footlights along the downstage edge, and also eye candy on all the different riser tiers.
For spots, Zoe chose 54 x Ayrton Perseos, all flown except for six on the midstage riser. The front truss included four Perseos for specials, six Martin MAC Ultra Wash for general stage wash, ten blinders and one Robe Robin Forte for a followspot. Another Robe Robin Forte was positioned upstage centre to have a followspot from behind for the vocalist.
Zoe was keen to program this show from scratch but, unfortunately, with her busy touring schedule, she just didn’t have the time.
“So I did have to clone it from my much smaller theatre show,” she said. “I then went through each cue one by one and updated accordingly. So it wasn’t quite 100% the show I wanted to do, but I’m still very happy and proud of the end result. The show was programmed in grandMA2, although I have finally made the jump to MA3 now that I have a bit of time to learn it, and recipes would have come in handy when moving programming from a smaller show into a much bigger one.”
The show incorporated a fair amount of video. Ice Nine has two albums of songs based on horror movies and has recently released songs based on The Matrix and Tim Burton’s Batman. So they love to have a video that represents the movies each song is based on. The video design featured two large screens upstage, one on each side of the inflatable. These acted as “TV” screens. The content looked like you were watching an old CRT TV and was the same on both screens. There were then banner screens lining the front of all the risers on the different tiers.
Zoe adds that the most memorable moment of the tour was definitely the very last show at Wembley Arena.
“It was such a great way to not only end a tour, but also end a massive year,” she remarked. “I also was able to fly my partner out to that show, and it was really special being able to have her there for it.”
Zoe is just about to start an Australian regional run with The Amity Affliction, after which they go straight into a US run. This will be followed by European, US and Australian tour with Ice Nine Kills.
