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Sarah Rushton-Read talks to lighting designer Roland Greil . . .
“The people I work with have gone way beyond the world of pure lighting design. Today we work in the realm of production design, regularly combining the lighting, scenery and video content design.”
He is also the regular design associate/programmer/lighting director of choice for many of the most prolific and talented lighting designers in the world. An accomplished ideas man himself, Greil works across a variety of genres, including theatre, concert touring, large-scale events and television and commonly works in close collaboration with designers including Patrick Woodroffe, Adam Bassett, Jerry Apelt and a host of others. 2015 saw Greil take care of Spandau Ballet’s arena tour, a televised spectacular (CHOGM Opening Ceremony) in Malta, Clusters of Light in Cairo and a host of other stunning projects. This year is no different as he kicks off with an equally impressive portfolio of work, starting with his collaboration with Patrick Woodroffe on the upcoming arena world tour for Adele.
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This is a far cry from his initiation into the business pulling cables, rigging lights and basic programming. “I’m extremely proud to have learned my craft from the ground up, and from some of the best practitioners of our time. This foundation means I can easily recognise what can and can’t be achieved on a project. This helps hugely when I’m working alongside designers to realise their vision.”
When eight-year-old Roland Greil went to a concert with his father, it was, paradoxically, the sound engineer that captivated his imagination and set him on a lighting focused trajectory. “From the moment I saw that engineer I wanted to be like him. By the time I was 12, I was building small lighting systems and lending them to my friends for parties.” Fast forward a couple of decades and today Greil is a partner in the respected creative collective, Einstein & Sons, with offices in Munich and Los Angeles.
74 LSi - February 2016
Of course, going from coiling cables to being a crucial cog in the gearbox of such designers is quite a journey: even so, Greil is modest about his success: “It’s all about being in the right place at the right time and having the passion, the determination and a thick enough skin to recover from any failures, disappointments or mistakes,” he laughs. “I did whatever I could to be in the right company and to persuade designers to accept me as their protégé - it worked.” Today, those designers rely on Greil in a number of ways, as he explains: “The key to any partnership is trust: I work with designers who invite me to be a primary part of realising their creative vision. They allow me to liaise with their client, help select
the best tools for the design and programme the show to bring their vision to life.” Greil is a keen team player: “I’m not the kind of programmer who just punches numbers dictated by a designer into the desk. The people I work with have gone way beyond the world of pure lighting design. Today we work in the realm of production design, regularly combining the lighting, scenery and video content design. For the big A-scale touring projects it can be a full-time job just talking to the artists and their management! Don’t get me wrong - the designers I work with know exactly what they want: my role is to understand and interpret that creative vision in as much or as little detail as they require.” No two projects are the same and it’s that variety that keeps Greil engaged. He is also in the unusual position of working across multiple genres. “My background is in concert touring, but I’ve worked on multiple TV projects this year. Each discipline has a different workflow and seeing the bigger picture is exciting. I regularly adopt ideas from each and apply them to the other. That perspective can often set a show apart from others in the same genre.” Notwithstanding such a rich and varied career, there remain projects that Greil still aspires to try: “I would love to work on a Cirque du Soleil show in Vegas. They habitually have six months to a year to create a show! Our biggest artistic challenges are time, human resources and budget. I would love the time to play. We have so many tools in our palette just not enough time to free-think and experiment.” To Greil, the best creative minds are childish: “The only thing that has changed by growing up is the size and the cost of the toys! For me, the definition of a good designer is one who strives to do something out of the ordinary, not just play safe.” Indeed, in the time of Greil’s meteoric rise he says he has seen a number of technological innovations that have freed many a designer’s mind: “The
introduction of media servers combined with the merging of set, lights and video were the first steps. The evolution of media servers and the sophistication of today’s lighting desks make staging a large-scale show surprisingly efficient, offering more time to be creative.” But how does this constant technological evolution inform and affect Greil’s ambitions? “From the programming perspective it’s hard to know where I want to be. I want to pursue a more holistic approach to design. I’m seeing amazing young programmers enter the arena, people who have grown up with this technology - particularly in the media server world. I don’t want to compete with that.” It’s these binary and hex minds that Greil believes are the next piece in the production puzzle: “Every project embraces change in some way. The role I take fluctuates. It’s increasingly tempting to leave that crazy computer stuff to the people who are good at it. For me, the way forward is to pull together the best teams for each project and then make the best use of that team’s skillset.” Conversely, Greil also likes to work with fine artists with no technical ability: “There are two worlds in content design: the lighting programmers who learned to use After Effects and other such editing software and the artists with no technical knowledge whatsoever! Unsurprisingly, the artists have a completely different approach, one that I like. Someone with a tech background is often limited by wondering if something is possible to realise technically. Artists are free, they can have an idea that may never be realisable. But it’s exciting and such visions take us somewhere fresh, they encourage innovation as we strive to apply them to the performance environment.” Greil says he believes that it’s crucial to always focus on the bigger picture. “Lighting, set and video can only ever be the backdrop. Our job is simply to create the canvas, the drama and the atmosphere in which the artist can paint the detail.”