Arms wide open for Robe on Creed tour
Floridian hard rockers Creed reunited and hit the road for their first tour in 11 years. The production design was created by Mathias Kuhn and included 80 x Robe moving lights and LED fixtures – 36 x MegaPointes, 30 x BMFL Spots, 4 x BMFL FollowSpots, 10 x FOOTSIE2 LED footlights and four RoboSpot remote follow systems – all supplied by rental company, Bandit Lites out of Nashville.
Mathias is based in Hamburg, Germany and brings his style and aesthetic to a lot of rock and metal bands, a genre he loves, and that offers plenty of scope for imagination and dramatic lighting. Mathias talked to the band after being asked onboard, who revealed that they liked the idea of a circular halo-like shape being associated with the stage look. Naturally, ensuring everyone’s visual expectations could be met whilst fitting into the available budget was a challenge, and Mathias spent considerable time choosing the right
fixtures and positioning them where he knew meticulous programming could help maximize the looks. The fragmented LED screens were part of the look he crafted to avoid the “big TV” syndrome, complete with ladder trusses loaded with fixtures in between to further break it up and enhance the depth of the performance area. He controlled the screen outputs via his Resolume video server, triggered by the lighting desk, which ensured there could be a carefully blended mix of playback content and IMAG footage from 7 cameras.
Robe MegaPointes are consistently Mathias’s first choice of moving light. “They are the first piece of kit that goes on the plot,” he confirmed when chatting about the design. This is because of their “compact size, big output, excellent gobo selection and quality beams” and the fact that “they look amazing even in the largest arenas!”
Mathias set up, programmed lighting and ran the show for half of the first leg of the “Summer of 99” tour before leaving due to other commitments, with lighting crew member Brian Bogovic operating for the remaining dates. Bandit’s lighting crew chief was Cheyan DeBrower who was joined by Haley Elliott and Lucas Gamez making up a brilliant touring team, with Kenneth Ackermann working as video crew chief for this department which had equipment supplied by PRG.
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