Rammstein on the road with Robe
- Details
Roland Greil from Woodroffe Bassett Design (WBD) created the lighting design together with Patrick Woodroffe and specified 56 Robe BMFL WashBeams, 12 BMFL Follow Spot LTs (long throws) and six LEDBeam 150 moving lights - among many others - for this tour.
WBD was contracted to produce and coordinate the tour’s production design including lighting, set and video design plus technical integration.
The lighting was a collaboration between Roland and Patrick Woodroffe who is also the show designer. Florian Wieder and Cuno von Hahn looked after the set design, and Jeremy Lloyd from Wonder Works directed the technical aspects of the design and integration. The band are also very involved in their stage presentations.
Most of the lighting hardware is integrated into the set design, so it was an interdepartmental effort from the very start, requiring great fluidity and a close working relationship between Roland, Patrick and Florian. One of the many advantages of WBD working like this was to create the exact lighting positions they wanted right from the start as part of the overall ‘environmental’ design. Video was amalgamated with the set in the same style as lighting.
The 38-metre-high central tower features a central transparent video screen, which can move up and down, and is made up from four vertical rails, each loaded with BMFL WashBeams and a lot of strobes - all with individual weather protection.
These BMFL WashBeams were picked for their brightness and features and are used as potent backlight and for beam effects as well as to highlight parts of the set architecture.
The BMFL Follow Spot LTs positioned on the FOH delay towers have been specially developed for long throw applications. In this case, they were remotely operated using a Follow Me system.
The LEDBeam 150s were positioned on the ‘roofette’ immediately above and over the band positions and used for key lighting the upstage band positions.
Roland worked on the programming with Marc Brunkhardt who is out on the road with the tour together with Faren Matern, operating lighting using four grandMA2 full-size consoles and a grandMA2 light.
The biggest overall challenge for lighting has been dealing with “the complexities and scale of the show,” says Roland, for which he credits having “a truly great” team onboard. “It’s been a pleasure to help create every aspect of this show,” he comments. “We were given the freedom to produce something unique and epic, and that’s exactly what we have done.”
He adds that the collaboration with the band and their management has been “superb” and that has in turn provided the perfect circumstances to be able to create something very special.
Other core imagineers involved in making this show happen include the full Rammstein creative team plus video programmer Tim Hornung, camera (IMAG) director Sven Offen and video content creators Haeger De and David Gesellbauer.
The tour’s production manager is Nicolai Sabottka and Jeremy Lloyd is the technical consultant. Lighting equipment is being supplied by Neg Earth Lights - lighting crew chief is Nick Barton - and video is from Solotech. WIcreations have supplied several custom engineering elements including the vertical rails to pull the columns of BMFL WashBeams up into place on the central tower.
The first leg of the tour completed in August and it goes out again in May 2020.
(LSi Online)
