Counting Crows find sweet spot with Robe
- May 8
- 3 min read
Lighting designer Conner Ostrowski of Wide Open Productions was excited to join the Counting Crows creative team earlier in 2025, bringingfresh ideas and energy to the stage aesthetics as the legendary Bay Area rockers hit the road withtheir Butter Miracle,The Complete Sweets album and world tour.
Conner chose to work with Robe moving lights – 10 x iFORTE LTXs, 16 x iPointe65s and 32 x Spiiders – at the core of an eye-catching lighting design, delighting the band and their diverse fan base as they kicked off a lengthy US tour with lighting equipment supplied by Upstaging.
With no video elements onstage, all the visual emphasis was on lighting to support the band’s latest musical venture.
Upstaging – with whom Conner has worked on previous projects, including for electro duo Chromeo – has a large inventory of Robe, but it was at Tennessee-based Pulse Lighting,owned and run by Preston and Paul Hoffman, here he initially “met and fell in love with Robe” products early on in his career. Conner still uses the pre-viz facilities at Pulse for much of his visualization work.
Wide Open Productions – Conner’s creative design studio – is renowned for producing inventive and appropriate visual designs; “Design with purpose” is their mantra, Conner explained. “We don’t necessarily pick the newest or trendiest fixtures just because we can or because they are available! Each design project is individually assessed and its creative treatment carefully thought through, with a mix of the right lighting products chosen to attain the best results.”
For Conner, who was born into the theater and grew up with it surrounding him, it was music to his ears to have a rock band that appreciated the drama, tension, and anticipation that theatrical-style lighting moments can bring to a performance. He specifically wanted to use iFORTES for key lighting and also for shooting out into the crowd and creating those big, sumptuous, beamy ‘rock-looks’ and WOW moments, pulling all in the room meaningfully into the energy onstage. So, iFORTES were a key fixture on the rig, with four rigged on the mid truss and six on the downstage truss. He knew there would be no issues with intensity when using iFORTES – in fact, there were times during the set when he had to tweak the brightness down! He also picked iFORTE because of reliability and good gobos, which were fundamental to the design, together with the animation wheels and color, all of which helped to paint the stage fluidly with lighting and illumination to support the music.
“There is no other fixture currently on the market where an animation wheel can be used fully zoomed out and the effect still has so much presence! The punch and zoom ratios for creating these effects work brilliantly there and they kill it every time.”
Conner thinks that the iPointe and iFORTE gobos align exceptionally well. All the iFORTE LTXs and iPointes were connected to a remote follow spotting system and could be selected for follow duties at any time.
Conner and his two programmers, Mike Gionfriddo and Scott Huggins, along with the other creative team members, evolved a very special show that was “as much fun as it was a challenge.” It really illustrated their imaginative talents as much as it did the flexibility and scope of the fixtures, allowing them to keep it contemporary and clean-looking.
The Upstaging crew chief was Paul Mundrick, and lighting techs were Emil Vuorijarvi, Kendall Clark, and Hannah-Grace Harper. “They were fantastic – and I cannot thank them enough for the great support, knowledge and fun we all had working together,” Conner stated. Hannah also managed the remote follow spotting system.
Conner also appreciated the “excellent” assistance from the team at Robe North America, and Upstaging, where he worked closely with account handler John Bahnick, project manager Josh Wagner and special projects / Follow Me programmer, John Weston, with additional Follow Me support from Chris Lose.
For the subsequent 7-week European leg of the tour, Conner ran lighting from an Avolites D9-330 console – they had two on the tour supplied by Neg Earth.
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