John Mayer Tour Creates Window Into The World


Grammy Award-winning musician John Mayer spent his summer touring across North America with 27 stops, including two nights at the famous Madison Square Garden. Mayer had several ideas for the show look, which he shared with producer Sam Pattinson of Treatment Studio.



“John always wants to progress and try something new,” Pattinson says. “We started by exploring several of his concepts, all good ideas and completely varied. Internally, we were interested in designing sets where the LED screen was secondary to the focus and create something that was driven by lighting design and not video. I started experimenting with traditional flats and gauze.” Pattinson worked closely with lighting designer Nathan Alves to pull the design together. “He proved that flats could work on that scale and behind the band. Combining that with the LED and video created some exciting results.”



“This was a fun task to design inside of, something physical, that was primarily lighting- and scenery-based,” explains Alves. “A portal surrounding a kinetic set piece. As John put it later in an Instagram post, ‘Your eye knows when you’re looking at pixels vs seeing something real.’ The idea was to be more theatrical than the typical rock performance and avoid the usual big visible structure above the stage. Hide all the technology that lights the scenic especially. Color and shadow without all the pieces and parts out on display.”



The resulting design featured a 51'x27' LED surround with a 40'x12' portal cut out in the bottom center, creating a window to the scenic pieces upstage of the wall. Scrim covered the portal, allowing the creative team to silhouette the flats from behind during the first half of the show and then fly them out in the second half to fully reveal the set pieces, designed by Pattinson and Gareth Blayney. “The set flats and the scrim in front of them are on a batten system that flies in and out with Kinesys hoists,” explains Alves. “The gallery changes dimension throughout the night, from a flat wall of color to a shadowbox, to a fully dimensional set piece with a few articulating elements such as clouds, balloons, etc.”


“Extending the set to the screen proved very successful,” comments Pattinson. “Spreading the set tree contours onto the screen and adding more elements like clouds and stars gave us a really big look and allowed us to incrementally reveal the stage design.”



The goal of the video content was to create something very tactile and theatrical so that the physical set was at the heart of everything creatively. “Video allowed us to enhance, extend, and light this in ways that went beyond what was possible with scenery alone,” describes video creative director Damian Hale. “At times, we wanted to deliberately blur the lines between lighting and video so we used a lot of color washes and glows which, when combined with the real lighting, really brought the set itself to life and allowed us to celebrate both the scenic elements and the players and instruments on stage rather than distracting from them.”


The custom content, commissioned to artists and filmmakers throughout the UK, mixed elements of classic Americana with pop culture, graphic design, and illustration. Iconic American landscapes such as Joshua Tree and Monument Valley became fantastical, neon dreamscapes.



“John delivers a set list anywhere from six hours to 30 minutes before showtime, and they are different every night, sometimes vastly so,” comments Alves. “The video team will give it a look over and ask me what color palette a song is in that night if it’s a new one to them. Our disguise tech will give me cue triggers for the individual video looks, and I trigger the entire show down a [MA Lighting] grandMA2 Full Size. Having everything come through one desk lets me adjust levels in realtime for all the elements. The left half of my console is a series of submasters for video, scenic, backlight, front light, etc. This keeps any one element from crushing the other.” Two disguise gx 2 media servers controlled the screens.


“Since the set list changed every night, what worked for a song one night possibly wouldn’t work the next due to its new place in the set list,” says camera director Jack Banks. “With all of this in mind, I wanted to approach the I-Mag cut in a way that would allow me to layer up shots in the moments where songs disappear into solos and also present a cleaner, slow-paced cut for the mellower moments. Combining the camera cut with the Notch effects also gave us some interesting looks to play with and allowed us to grade the cameras to match the content that had been produced.”



During intermission, Mayer’s “Current Mood” backstage sessions were shared live on Instagram as well as broadcast to the show screens. “Brandon Kraemer advised, and Katie Friesema put the system in place,” states Pattinson. “It was a great addition to the show.”



The most challenging aspect of executing Mayer’s vision was time. “John’s other band, Dead and Company, wrapped a tour two weeks before this one,” concludes Pattinson. “Because of this, our usual design cycle was shortened a bit to allow for some needed downtime. Since we share a lot of crew positions with the Dead and Co. team, we had to wait for them to finish to grab a few key persons that had been remoting their pre-production duties. It was a balancing act for sure. Of course, no one wanted to compromise in our design choices, but we had to be sure to create something that was technically achievable in that timeframe. I’d be remiss not to give credit to Upstaging and their team’s support here. Without their help, we would have been significantly further behind when we arrived in Albany to present the design to John.”


Lighting Equipment:

ACME Solar Impulse



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