In all, there were 101 LED fixtures used for the school production. Color-coded lighting plot for UT/El Paso’s production of The Three Musketeers. The variety of LED beam, focus and lens options posed a design challenge. 2011 JUNE <strong>PLSN</strong> 23
PRODUCTION PROFILE P R O J E C T I O N L I G H T S & S TA G I N G N E W S All in the Family Patrick Woodroffe, Michael Keller and Upstaging Shape the Looks of Ozzy’s Scream Tour Photos & Text by SteveJennings Ozzy and Sharon’s family lifestyle may differ a bit from the previous generation’s Ozzie and Harriet, but LD Patrick Woodroffe, lighting director Michael Keller and other longtime-supporters of Ozzy’s live shows say an extended family feeling exists nevertheless. “It’s like a family — a truly dysfunctional family — who you get to choose,” Keller jokes. “This, in conjunction with working with some great new people, made this tour one for the books,” he says, of the recently-concluded Scream arena tour. “It’s always enjoyable — always a laugh, with Ozzy,” agrees Woodroffe. “He tends to not let us take any of this too seriously, but his approach is then balanced by the professionalism and organization that production manager Dale “Opie” Skjerseth and Michael and their crew bring to the project.” Woodroffe, who has also served as LD for The Rolling Stones, Genesis, The Police, AC/DC, has lit many of Ozzy’s solo tours and his Ozzfest events in the past. “I’ve known Sharon for 30 years, from when I lived in Los Angeles in the late 1970s, so when I got the call for this tour, it wasn’t unexpected,” he says. “I brought in lighting director Michael Keller right from the beginning,” Woodroffe added. “He’s done most of the Ozzyrelated shows I’ve designed, and he is very much my co-designer. He programmed the show in rehearsal, and then continued to develop it once the tour started. We spoke right from the beginning and once the rig and the stage set were designed he very much made the show his own.” Previz vs. Reality plsn The timing wasn’t ideal — Keller was on a different tour when he got the call, which threatened to put a crimp in the pre-production schedule. But he managed to work it out. “Since the time was limited, I started to pre-program on my MacBook Pro using grandMA on PC and grandMA 3D Visualizer,” Keller says. “On my days off, I programmed a song or two a day. I was able to preprogram the entire show, so when we showed up in San Bernardino, it was a matter of cleaning up the cues.” Although many of the looks onstage could be pre-visualized, there were still the inevitable surprises. At one point in the show, Ozzy uses a power hose to shoot foam into the audience, and gets soaked himself, for example. “We did have to cut and move some floor fixtures so they wouldn’t be power-washed every night.” Other surprises are gear-related. “Patrick’s design for Ozzfest 2010 incorporated a few fixtures I had not worked with before,” Keller says. “I had not used the Clay Paky Alpha Beam 300 before, and, in the visualizer, you really don’t get a real grasp of what they actually do. When we were in production rehearsals, I was pleasantly surprised.” An Efficient Rig plsn Upstaging Inc. is the lighting contractor for the tour, Woodroffe notes, and “as for fixtures, I try to keep an open mind, but, really, all the moving lights nowadays tend to be pretty amazing — reliable, bright, clever. And so one tries to work with what is available in a given situation to get the biggest bang for your buck.” As a whole, the tour didn’t <strong>com</strong>e close to setting any world records for total fixture count. But as Keller says, “for being a small fixture count system, we got the most out of what we had. The Vari*Lite 3500 Wash FX fixtures were the backbone of the system; their ability to ‘beam blast’ Patrick Woodroffe and Michael Keller created big-rig looks… …with a less-than-huge number of fixtures. 24 <strong>PLSN</strong> JUNE 2011
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