“600 days in the planning,” says lighting designer John Featherstone of Lightswitch, who started working on Hans Zimmer Live in 2019 for a 2020 tour. Postponed to a 2021 tour. And again to 2022. “I knew Hans initially though a dear friend who composes with Hans, and my godson plays in Hans’ band,” says Featherstone. “It’s like a family connection. That led to my working on the tour,” adds the LD, who collaborated with scenic designer Derek McLane and projection designer Peter Nigrini, who together brought a theatrical vocabulary to a concert tour.
Read about Derek McLane's scenic design here.
“Hans wanted a totally distinctive aesthetic, and it’s a long show so we wanted to take the audience on a visual journey that was in keeping with his musical journey,” notes Featherstone who quips: "it’s visually musical if you know what I mean. The lighting illustrates Zimmer’s movie music, from the gentle Asian influence of The Last Samurai to the crazy psychic world of The Dark Knight. His music covers all genres so the lighting needed to be something that ticks all those boxes.”
Hans Zimmer Light Plots & Gear List
Featherstone designed a system that “moves and breathes like the music,” using CyberHoists for cues that are fluid and musical, rather than mechanical, with the moving trusses adding an architectural element. In looking for a fixture that is super-versatile and compact, with amazing colors, he opted for the Robe MegaPointe, which can provide anything from “dappled sunlight through the trees with a theatrical focus to the very narrow archetypical rock-show beam.” The architecture of the rig was informed by a mise-en-scène with Zimmer downstage center and the band and orchestra on risers behind him. “I use a lot of sidelight with the MegaPointes on side ladders,” Featherstone points out. The color in the light runs from soft theatrical pastels to a bolder rock palette, tweaking the filters and color wheels in the fixtures to attain the super-saturated tones.
“Hans wanted a non-traditional start to the show,” explains Featherstone. “We started with the downstage LED screen at stage level with a color wash of the Ukrainian flag over it, so that the first thing the audience sees is themselves, in a sense it is a way to celebrate getting together after difficult times to enjoy the evening, but also honoring those in the orchestra from Ukraine and those still suffering in the atrocities of war.”
Then the show starts with what the LD calls “an amazing soft a cappella aria,” with the band seen in strong desert-tones backlight when the screen rises. From soft and surreal the show moves to more bombastic and even to the bagpipes of Dune in Zimmer’s Academy Award-winning movie scores. “This year when he won his second Oscar, for Dune, he was in Amsterdam and his kids had to wake him up to tell him,” says Featherstone.
The score for Gladiator (which Featherstone says is one of his favorite pieces of music) posed a challenge for Zimmer when he was composing. “There is no strong female role in the film,” notes the LD, “so he wanted the music to seem like a female supporting role. The live performance ranges from the achingly beautiful with Pedro Eustache playing the duduk, an ancient Armenian woodwind instrument, to the beautiful voice of Loire Carter. The arc of the piece is soft to bombastic, with orchestral force and solo women’s voices. It is a wonderful piece to light.”
Featherstone refers to the music in The Dark Knight as “a study from order to chaos,” as Batman goes up against The Joker in a battle of good VS evil. Zimmer travels with his giant modular synthesizer which adds a unique electronic sound in addition to three dueling bass guitarists. The lighting is a visual assault on the audience with a mix of chaotic beams in the MegaPointes and a red blast from Robe Tetras. It’s a descent into disorder and chaos via the lighting," says the LD.
“Not only did I have an amazing crew (see list below) but I also had the great pleasure of working with my daughter Hailey, who is doing a fantastic job as the tour lighting director. I feel really fortunate as a father to work with my daughter, and this is also in line with Hans’ ‘family first’ ethos," Featherstone adds. 'The amazing Chris Herman serving as as programmer on an MA Lighting grandMA3, handling the lighting and kinetic truss cues. We had the better part of a month at Compose Visual in Brooklyn, NY, then a few weeks in Berlin, using the 3D engine of Depence for pre-viz. So we were in good shape,” admits the LD. “We had a solid show when we left pre-viz. We were also able to get the music files we needed from Hans’ team, so we had amazing resources, which helped us be more creative.”
In terms of color, Featherstone and McLane were very “very conscious of the color in terms of the arc of the movies. Our color references related to the films.” Such as light sands and harsh desert tones for Dune, or purples and fiery tones for Wonder Woman, while Pirates Of The Caribbean is bathed in shades of the ocean, which is omnipresent in the tropics, and Lion King is majestic in amber and magenta, as well as the colors of jungle flora and fauna, and finally, The Dark Knight is more monochromatic.
The movie scenes were broken down into a ribbon of stripes of color (see color studies below). “This helped us define the palettes for the songs,” notes Featherstone. “We used colors that support the films but without using actual film clips. Instead, Nigrini created original content to evoke the feel of the movies.”
Click To Expand PDF of color studies:
Featherstone points out that this project was ‘incredibly collaborative. With Derek and Peter, the lines were blurred between us, we all influenced each other, it was a truly collaborative intersection and a great way to work. For example, as far as the lighting and video are concerned, you can’t always tell where the video content ends and the lighting begins, and vice versa. Hans loves to bring people together like this, creating unusual partnerships to achieve remarkable results. It was a fantastic experience working as part of this creative team.”
The Hans Zimmer Live tour continues in Europe throughout April and perhaps beyond, with hopes for further dates in the future.
Credits
- Technical Direction: Tobias Busskamp, Thomas Schmitt
- Lighting Design: John Featherstone
- Lighting Director: Hailey Featherstone
- Lighting Programmer: Chris Herman
- Scenic Design: Derek McLane
- Media Design: Peter Nigrini
Lighting Crew
Jens Modigell- crew chief;
Sascha Laue- systems and network;
Marvin Jürgens- robo spots and systems;
Kevin Schulze-Borgmühl- dimmers;
Ludwig Sigel- kabel 1;
Christoph Konermann- kabel 2;
Mona Rapp- kabel 3;
Peter Hermanns- kabel 4
CyberHoists: Tobias Frey; Boris HölscherIngo; Ingo Koenzen; Florian Renisch