RoboSpot lighting team with Shap Shapard (photo: Todd Kaplan)
USA - The much anticipated Twenty One Pilots Icy tour hit the road this summer, offering lighting designer Tyler ‘Shap’ Shapard the chance to produce an elegant and imaginative lighting design based on atmospherically engineering the mood and vibes.
A cornerstone of this design was 80 x Robe MegaPointes explained Shap who collaborated closely on this tour with co-designer and programmer Dayne DeHaven. Their creative process involved Shap producing the essential looks and building blocks for each number and Dayne completing the ‘nuts and bolts’ programming which they finessed together. Shap was also on the road running lighting day-to-day.
MegaPointes are a personal favourite fixture of Shap’s and they have featured on the last two Twenty One Pilots tour cycles which included the immediately post Covid Takeover tour earlier in 2022, where the band played four different sized venues in six key cities, followed by an international summer festival tour.
The MegaPointes were dotted all over the five upstage / downstage orientated touring truss ‘fingers’ which gave the whole stage look an aura of architectural elegance and were joined by 21 x Robe BMFL WashBeams being used for primary key light, about which Shap is equally as enthusiastic.
“BMFL WashBeam is an epic great wash light. The framing shutters are fantastic, and when hung on a downstage truss with the zoom rolled right out, they bring an incredible depth to the picture. The intensity fall off is very limited along the BMFL zoom and it blends very naturally, producing that unique even wash right across the stage.”
Eight BMFL FollowSpots with integral cameras were another critical element of this light show. Shap also drafted 36 x Spikies into the floor package, chosen for their minuscule size, brightness and 360-degree rotation.
Twenty were deployed along the top of the low onstage video wall, and the rest dotted around the two ‘cry decks’ interspersed with a battery of cryo jets and confetti canons.
The Icy arena show design was also based on being able to clone fixtures quickly and painlessly for the international festival section of the tour where they headlined numerous European festivals including the Friday night main stage at Colours of Ostrava in the Czech Republic.
Keeping everything flowing smoothly on the road was production manager Rodney Johnson. Lighting, video and rigging equipment was supplied by Solotech, audio by Clair, SFX by Image SFX and automation / staging by SGPS.

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