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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
Jay-Z and Eminem Home and Home Visuals Prepared in Prelite Studios
Eminem performs in Detroit during the four-stop tour. Patrick Dierson and Daniel Boland relied on Prelite Studios
for design support and previsualization.
NEW YORK and DETROIT — Home and
Home, the joint tour featuring Jay-Z and Eminem,
only included four dates in the artists’ respective
hometowns (New York and Detroit). But it was
still essential that Patrick Dierson, lighting designer
for the tour, and Daniel Boland, show designer
for Eminem, create a full complement of
lighting looks for both artists and video content
for Eminem.
Both designers called upon bicoastal Prelite
Studios to get a head start and maximize their
creative time in an offline environment.
Dierson and Boland are longtime clients of
Prelite, which helps lighting designers and programmers
use emerging technologies to previsualize
lighting and video elements for productions.
“Prelite has saved my bacon on more than
one occasion,” Dierson said. “For the Home and
Home Tour there would have been no way the
production was able to rent out Comerica Park or
Yankee Stadium for the time it took to make the
show sweet. So it was amazing to have Prelite’s
technology at our disposal.”
About a week before the band arrived, Rodd
McLaughlin set up a Prelite system running Vision
software and Autodesk 3ds Max along with
grandMA lighting control consoles at New York’s
SIR Studios. “That enabled us to do all the previz
in the studio adjacent to where the band rehearses,”
Dierson said. “I was able to get updates
in realtime from the band when they came in,
and we had the Pro Tools engineer, monitor engineer
and Front of House engineer all in the same
room, too. It was a very cohesive environment to
work in, with obvious benefits to the workflow.”
He found Prelite especially helpful for “musicians
who tend to ‘see’ with their ears. They could
walk into our room and see the previz on the giant
screen, and I’d tell them, ‘This is what I’ll be
doing when you play.’ They immediately got it.
Even more mutual respect was built up during
this process because the band saw how much
effort we put into the show and how much we
need each other to deliver a great show.”
Dierson also partnered with Drew Findley,
Jay-Z’s screen director, and Dirk Sanders, his video
director, who managed all the rapper’s video
content with their own system to create a “very
cohesive” approach to Jay-Z’s performance.
Dierson noted that he remembers what it’s
like to sit in the cheap seats, and he used that recollection
to the concertgoers’ advantage when
designing show lighting.
“I like to use Prelite to fly to the cheapest
seats in the house and make certain those people
get a really interesting concert experience,”
he said. “I’m very cognizant of what it’s like to be
up there, and I always try to design something
within the show that can get out to them. For
this show we had towers of audience lights that
could extend the stage look to the back of the
house. The gobos, templates and washes were
equally powerful there as in the front row.”
He hadn’t intended to use moving trusses
for Jay-Z’s portion of the show, but discovered
that there were “a handful of moments” where
he wanted to deploy them. “Prelite let me drop
in various moving trusses, play around and see
what were the most interesting moves with a
touch of a button,” he noted. “It was fantastic.”
NEWS
On the West Coast, Daniel Boland worked
quite differently with Prelite. Tom Thompson
shipped a Prelite system to Boland’s home office
in Altadena, CA, where it worked in tandem with
a pair of grandMAs and a rack of media servers.
Boland programmed Eminem’s lighting on one
console while Matt Shimamoto programmed
the video content on another.
“I felt the real theme of the show for Eminem
was his recovery from his addiction to drugs and
alcohol. It was his comeback tour,” Boland said.
“I wanted a bold look — everything was bigger
and brighter, with more powerful instruments.
In fact, it was the first time I had used certain fixtures
that Patrick had spec’d for the rig, like the
Chromlech Jarags that rim the eyeball-shaped
screens on stage. And I had never used PRG Bad
Boys in a stadium context, so it was a matter of
getting them to punch out.
“It was great to mock up the rig and sit comfortably
in my office and program any time I felt
the inspiration. And I wasn’t wasting people’s
time while I was creating color palettes and focus
palettes on the new fixtures.”
Boland also noted that he could “configure
the moving trusses that Patrick designed so they
weren’t in the way of the images on Eminem’s
screen,” and added that, “working with Ben Johnson,
who created Eminem’s video content, we
used the previz software to take snapshots of the
screens and email them to the rigger physically
moving the trusses so he could configure the
trusses to not get in the way of the images. When
we arrived in Detroit, the trusses were already
programmed — an added bonus I didn’t expect.”
2010 NOVEMBER PLSN
11