Travis Scott - Astroworld: Wish You Were Here Tour

TRAVIS SCOTT – ASTROWORLD: WISH YOU WERE HERE TOUR

Celebrating a year since the release of ASTROWORLD, Travis Scott transforms a sold-out O2 Arena, London into a raucous Houston theme park. TPi’s Jacob Waite meets the visual team behind the one-of-a-kind spectacle…

Put together by a formidable crew of creatives, the Texas-born and Los Angeles-based multiplatinum artist’s live shows are renowned for their bold looks and brash vocal delivery. Immersed in bright lights, plumes of CO 2 and carnival iconography, for one night only, London’s O2 Arena was transformed into carnival-inspired fairground, based on the rapper’s beloved Six Flags AstroWorld – a Houston theme park that inspired the Travis Scott’s latest number-one album and formidable North American tour, ASTROWORLD.

STARGAZING

Ahead of the theme park of theatrics, TPi grabbed Lighting Designer, Ben Dalgleish, who previously worked on Post Malone’s Beerbongs & Bentleys tour earlier this year. “Travis Scott is a really unique act in the sense that he has the complete oppose vibe of Post Malone, who is all about theatrics and minimalist lighting and design.”

Dalgleish dubbed the show’s theme as a “toy box” of ideas, noting the giant teddy bears and carnival carousel on the main stage. “A Travis Scott show mimics the conventions of a rollercoaster; it’s a ‘balls to the wall’ approach to match his energetic performance.”

Transcending genre constraints, Scott’s live shows combine punk and heavy metal conventions – stagediving, mosh pits and headbanging. His on-stage movement coupled with automation and lighting is haphazard and intentionally jarring. “We want it as chaotic as possible to match his energy,” Dalgleish noted.

Having perfected an eye-watering scream, Scott uses his voice to summon euphoria. His signature sound emits a rapturous vapour trail to make intimate tracks like 90210 intensely poignant. “A Travis Scott show doesn’t compare to the record,” Dalgleish explained on the high-intensity nature of the set list. “The songs are completely unrecognisable to what you’re listening to on the album, so we always program lighting and visuals to the the live audio to match his energy.”

Not afraid of the challenge, Dalgleish made the executive decision to design a brand-new rig for the O2 show. “I knew as we were not able to bring the rollercoaster from the US leg of the ASTROWORLD tour, the lighting design and programming had to be special.”

Dalgleish and programmer Jacopo Ricci took on the task of building a new show in the space of 24 hours, with the pair alternating time on the rig at the O2 to program the 27 song setlist. “Travis Scott one of the most dynamic and engaging performers around at the moment and the lighting is designed to reflect that with arrays of fixtures all across the arena, B-stage, thrust and main stage.”

With such a quick turnaround time, there was only one vendor in mind for Dalgleish: PRG. The company’s Account Handler, Benjamin Holdsworth, commented: “The original design that was put forward changed dramatically. We didn’t get the final drawings until very late, but we were able to pull out all the stops and make it happen.”

Far from usual but not unheard of in the live touring industry, the PRG team “bent over backwards” to supply lighting, rigging and a crew of 19 faces to the rigging, automation and the lighting departments. “We only had one load-in day before show day and as there are so many moving elements, we thought it was wise to split shift the personnel,” Holdsworth recounted. “This allowed us to identify any issues from the start and mitigate the problems should they arise.

With no rehearsals, Holdsworth prepared for the show by watching Scott’s headline show at Wireless Festival. “It meant we were able to come away with a visualisation of how the show needed to look before passing it onto the crew chiefs and rigging team to ensure the end result was well received,” he said.

PRG Crew Chief Richard Gorrod got to work putting together the plan of attack. Iestyn Thomas was the on-site lighting chief taking over from

Gorrod following pre-production. “At PRG, we certainly enjoy a challenge,” Holdsworth chuckled. “There were points where we didn’t know if we would be able to get our own crew into the show because it was so busy and sold out!” he exclaimed.

The large PRG rig housed 96 Icon Beams, mainly covering six automation trusses. On four of the trusses, 12 Solaris Flare LRs outline the trusses. On the side automation truss, 48 Showtec Sunstrips nodded to the carnival theme of the tour, with festoon-style lighting partnered with tungsten light definition.

A convention of Dalgleish’s lighting designs, a backwall of 60 Claypaky Scenius Unicos and 30 Claypaky Mythos moving lights punched through the haze. The LD professed: “The Unicos are the only lights that I find are able to keep up with video in terms of brightness while using gobos,” he explained. “There are plenty of looks in the show which feature complex gobo chases and effects. Having a bright fast spot is key for this which I why I always try and use the Unico.”

A total of 48 Robe MegaPointes were housed on the roof of the rig and used as a hybrid spot as well as beam. A range of GLP fixtures, specifically 60 GLP JDC 1s, 28 GLP impression X4L and 24 GLP impression X4 20 Bars, were used, while a large number of traditional 4-Way Moles and 34 Chauvet Professional Strike 4s helped light the crowd along with the GLP JDC1 strobes. “It’s a very bright show,” Dalgleish stated. “Travis wants to see the crowd a lot and the JDC1s are invaluable with their tilt function, plus being able to have a colour wash or a bright white strobe.”

For control, PRG provided a trio of MA Lighting grandMA2 full size consoles, two for lighting and one for video, along with a grandMA2 lite console, four NPUs and four PRG Super Nodes. To match Travis Scott’s onstage unpredictability, the show was run completely live. “We’re constantly trying to push the envelope to make the show feel fresh each night,” Dalgleish continued. “You couldn’t timecode the show and make it feel the same way each night because it’s so big and brash. It’s controlled chaos for sure.”

PRG identified early on that the four lighting trusses needed to be automated above the audience, so there was only one option. Twelve 500kg/1,250kg Movecat Hoists and V-Motion Hooks controlled four automated PRG Bat trusses over the audience. Holdsworth said: “The production team were absolutely blown away by the capabilities of Movecat.”

Overseeing the automation for the tour was Peter MacDonald who was brought in by PRG to work closely with Dalgleish to enable the LD to get the most out of the powerful Movecat automation system. “He’s the go-to guy for Movecat in the UK, and on a prestigious project like this, there is nobody else we wanted to use; we were really fortunate to have him onboard,” Holdsworth said.

With hordes of Travis Scott fans leaving the venue happy, Holdsworth reflected: “Overall, I’m really pleased with the outcome. There were lots of sleepless nights and extra hours put in to get the show off the ground, but as soon as we saw the smiling faces in the crowd, that’s when we knew it was all worthwhile.”

Holdsworth thanked Gorrod and Q Willis from PRG who “invested a huge amount of time” on the project and without whom, he said, the show “wouldn’t have got off the ground.” He concluded: “I think there are champions of every genre – from hip-hop, to rock ’n’ roll, rap to pure pop. It’s our privilege to be working with artists at the top of their game in every genre.”

BUTTERFLY EFFECT

To partner the lighting, Dalgleish brought in Notch Designer, Ryan Sheppard of Dark Matter Technologies. “Notch is such a big part of the show. Travis recently posted a photo on his Instagram feed captioned ‘the real me’, while he was stood in front of the Notch-generated screen content,” Dalgleish commented. “I think he really enjoys seeing manipulating visions of himself, which we’re able to create real-time on stage; it’s been great to work with Ryan to push the boundaries and we’re always looking to try out new ideas. Every show has its own characteristics.”

The use of Notch IMAG effects shaped the overall aesthetics of the show by building off both pre-rendered content and Dalgleish’s lighting looks. This in turn created more connection to the artist while still maintaining a visually cohesive look with a lot of field-based effects. Sheppard said: “There were a lot of moments in the show where we needed a slow-moving, almost trippy effect, and image field emitters helped us achieve this.”

For higher-energy moments, Sheppard used multiple glitch effects, particle systems set up in a variety of ways and fractal noise generators with a colour ramp to give some looks the colourful ASTROWORLD feel. “Some effects for the O2 show were developed from scratch based on what we had learned from the festival run for specific moments,” he said. “However, a large portion of the effects from the festival run still remained in the show.”

This ended up being almost a 50/50 split between content and IMAG effects. Although there was some pre rendered content from Notch in the show as well, as Sheppard described. “The biggest challenge is that it’s simply a live environment. All elements of the show are changing constantly, and we need to be able to react to blown-out camera shots or not having a shot at all very quickly. The solution for this just comes down to a good camera director and shader.”

Another challenge for the creatives was simply keeping up with Travis Scott as he could play any track in any order. “We dealt with this by programming and busking the entire show through sock puppet on an MA Lighting grandMA2 console. This allowed us the flexibility to switch quickly to whatever look we needed at any moment,” he explained.

The video was run manually through a pair of disguise gx 2 media servers. “We use disguise gx 2s on almost all of our shows,” Sheppard declared. “Having the ability to render notch blocks natively, playback

pre-rendered content from the same system along with the 3D previs when reviewing looks with a client is unparalleled.

Remarkably, the team’s entire European run was operated entirely on locally sourced servers. “Trying to source the same hardware and ensure consistency in every country would have been very difficult with another system,” Sheppard concluded.

CAROUSEL

Creative Technology (CT) was brought in a week and a half prior to the show, to provide a mix of video and custom set pieces. The company’s Project Manager, Pat Dore, wound the clocks back: “We had an idea of what the production team wanted to achieve with the look and visual LED elements of both stages,” he recalled.

The CT team made up of 16 on-site crew, then worked back from that, collating everything required to build a fully automated, three-tier carousel on the main stage. The rear back wall centre screen was made up of INFiLED 5.9, 18.5m x 10.5m LED panels, the three-sided SR cube was ROE Visual CB5 18 tiles x 2.5 LED tiles, and the SR cube was ROE Visual CB5 13 tiles x 3.5 LED tiles.

The carousel was flown via Kinesys, to move up and down and boasted 20 ROE Visual CB5 20 tiles on the top and 40 ROE Visual CB5 40 tiles on the bottom. The catwalk and thrust comprised a VISS NX7 LED floor display, while left and right IMAG projection came in the shape of two 20ft x 14ft projection screens, with Panasonic DZ21K projectors on each side.

CT supplied a Ross Carbonite 4k PPU, four Sony HSE 300 cameras – one at FOH, two long lens cameras at the side of the arena, and a wireless camera that roamed between the B-stage and main stage – in addition to a fixed camera in the pit. A trio of Agile Robo cameras were housed on-stage to provide a variety of shots.

“Most of the camera shots were filtered through Notch because Travis doesn’t have a set list and performs on the fly. It’s fascinating to watch the touring crew, who are well versed in his performance, constantly react to him on stage,” Dore said. “His touring crew know what they’re doing and are well tuned in to his style of performance.”

For the entire crew, time was the biggest challenge. “Having custom LED cubes and carousel on Kinesys was really time consuming; although not detrimental to the show, having had some pre-production time before we arrived would have been preferable. However, we understand in some cases this is not possible and the team are prepared to work to whatever restraints may be in place to ensure the show runs without a hitch”, commented Dore. The video team included Arkadiusz Wegrzyn, Jack Gibson, Lee Hunter and John Richardson, as well as Media Server Operator, Christian Dickinson, and Camera Director, Tom Robinson. Show communication was achieved by 25 Riedel Communications Bolero wireless comms packs. Dore summed up: “All the crew were unbelievable and put in a serious shift to get it done. It was a great show with fantastic energy and all the hard work was well worth it!”

ASTROTHUNDER

A rush of adrenaline accompanied by theatrical SFX; Travis Scott’s shows violently opposes lethargy – there is ferocious energy throughout. Keeping pace was BPM SFX Project Manager, Matthew Heap, who has witnessed the evolution of the rapper’s UK live shows from academy-sized venues to soldout London dates at Wireless Festival and the O2 Arena.

He commented: “We wanted to upscale the Wireless Festival date for this show and put in my ideas for pyro and airbursts in-action.” Heap explained that 40 Airbursts with Concussion and 90 Units of stage pyro created a series of “big looks” throughout proceedings. “It’s not a standard setup but it’s one that the artist is used to, with the addition of pyrotechnics.”

Ten CO 2 jets lined the main stage, while a further eight covered the B-stage. Bringing the heat, 10 GFlames were located on the main stage, along with a pair of Low Fog Generators to create atmosphere. While seven

12W RGB OPS Laser Projectors and a trio of 20W RGB OPS Laser Projectors were integrated on the show, particularly on the automated carousel. “These are all trademarks of a Travis Scott show,” Heap began. “However, on this run we increased our SFX arsenal with the addition of extra pyro and more things to the B-stage, such as CO2 jets, to create an extra ‘wow factor’ to the performance.”

With special effects in abundance, health and safety was paramount. “We only really fire the effects on the main stage when he is either up on the carousel or on the thrust. Often artists can get too excitable when they’re performing and enter the wrong place at the wrong time,” he said. “It’s our job to anticipate movement, especially when guests enter the fray; it’s integral to be mindful of multiple people on-stage. However, the nature of a one-off show meant that time was at a premium. Heap said: “It takes a lot of time and thought to achieve this kind of show safely.”

Blake Harward joined Heath in the SFX crew, while the laser team comprised Toby McKnight and Dan Wilce. “It was a great show to be a part of,” Heap said. “I loved working for the team, and I look forward to working with them again. Overall, it looked great and the audience loved it. I don’t think the hype will disappear any time soon, especially with the likes of Ed Sheeran coming out as a special guest.”

SICKO MODE

Bridging the gap of the so-called ‘Soundcloud rap’ scene and arena touring, Travis Scott’s latest live offering has laid down the gauntlet and firmly set a benchmark for his contemporaries. What is more, if the enthusiasm of the artist’s visual team is anything to go by, this just the beginning... TPi Photos: @felix.aaa www.travisscott.com www.prg.uk www.ct-group.com www.bpm-sfx.com