Embracing the phrase “larger than life,” English pop sensation Robbie Williams took over Europe’s stadiums this summer with his Take The Crown tour. From the opening moment when Williams appeared out of the top of an enormous 41'-high sculpture of his head and zip-lined onto the stage, it was obvious this was a show boasting bold looks and big production. In fact, just naming the creative team itself, show producer Lee Lodge, creative director Willie Williams, and iconic scenic designer/architect, the late Mark Fisher, and Ric Lipson of Stufish, gives one a good idea this was a “go big or go home” design.
Williams and Fisher took inspiration from the original album artwork, featuring a golden bust of Robbie Williams’ head, and took that to stadium-sized level. The tour design included not only the sculptural head, which was also a 46,000-pixel video surface coming out of the massive back video wall, but had seven more enormous three-dimensional heads that moved around the stage as the singer climbed, flew, emerged from, and performed on them during the show.
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Key to this show was complete integration of staging, lighting, and video, based around the appearance of a series of seven Robbie Heads,” says Williams. “Each head had a different function on a different scale as the show progressed. The show had very distinct acts or phases, each showcasing a different aspect. Act I was in daylight, so we created a sort of Rio Carnival environment. As dusk fell, we moved into a focused, centralized acoustic Act II before the video-based home run of Act III. Finally, the more contemplative encore section used the darkness to close out the show with pyro and other effects.”
Production manager Wob Roberts knew from the beginning that Williams and Fisher would think big, but even he was impressed by the scale of the production. “Willie and Mark together definitely were a daunting team. It was incredible working with them, especially because of their attention to detail.”
The Massive Wall
That marriage of creativity and detail was epitomized in the video wall and head that was the visual backdrop of the stage. “The back wall is the design,” asserts Roberts. “When they said, ‘Let’s make the 3D sculpture of the face coming out of the wall be video,’ I asked, ‘How do you do that?’ Mark said, ‘I have no idea, but I know it can be done.’ That’s when they brought Frederic [Opsomer, CEO of Tait] onboard and figured out how to make it happen.”
The 134'x76' video wall built by Tait, finished with screen-printed gold polycarbonate panels, comprised 700 panels that incorporated 20 different custom shapes. There were 18,000 Tait Pixel Tablets inserted into the panels. In keeping with the London 2012 Olympics legacy goal of sustainability, the Pixel Tablets themselves were from the system that was used during the Opening Ceremonies. The LED back wall also had 19.5'x25' doors on either side that tilted back 6˚ before raising 24’ to allow props and scenic elements to move through.
The sculpture of Robbie Williams’ head on the wall was created by Tait using 50 custom-cut panels that were modeled from a scan of the singer’s face. The scan was imported into CAD software, and molds of fiberglass were made to match each section. Holes were then drilled to house 46,000 Barco FLX-24 video pixels, supplied by XL Video. “The back wall was only ever going to be realized by Tait. No one else could have come close,” says Roberts.
The proper placement of the 46,000 pixels in the face was paramount to making the video mapping work, so video director Stefaan “Smasher” Desmedt created a map of the pixel holes for Tait to follow. “Because it was a 3D element, I had to really know where every pixel physically was living in 3D space to put a perfect mapped image on there,” Desmedt points out. “We filmed Robbie’s head with three cameras on angles and then made an unfolded template of it. Then I took that into [Autodesk’s] Maya. I had to draw every single pixel—46,000 pixels! The mapping design for me was certainly the biggest challenge.” At Tait, Desmedt projected the holes onto each panel so that Tait could place the pixels exactly.
XL Video supplied Desmedt with d3 Technologies d3 4U servers for all the video playback and output. Desmedt worked with d3, who created a new spreadsheet-based fixture database, capturing the raster coordinates and wiring position of every pixel in the head. During pre-production, d3 generated a range of test patterns that allowed wiring errors to be identified and corrected in the software.
Show after show, audiences reacted enthusiastically as the wall and head that they thought was a backdrop suddenly comes to life with video content. “When that sculpture came on, everyone was blown away,” notes Desmedt. “It was a really unexpected element for the audience because it only got dark outside about three-quarters of the way into the show, so we didn’t use the head until then, and even then, it was only in six songs. It didn’t get overused so it worked, and it was powerful.”
Desmedt collaborated with London-based video artist collective Treatment, working closely with Luke Halls to produce the content, including the filming of Robbie Williams’ head. Desmedt also did live mixing during the show for the two side screens. “Doing cameras for Robbie was one of the most amazing things I have done,” he says. “He works great with the cameras, using the I-Mag to really reach the people in the back. He is very aware of the cameras, and he looks into them and plays with them, all while remembering the choreography.” The video package included an HD camera system, with eight Grass Valley LDK 8000 cameras and two 18'x26.5' Pixled F-11 I-Mag screens.
To handle the loads and heights required by the Stufish design, StageCo supplied a fully custom-built stage structure that incorporated the XXL tower system. The open plan, stadium-wide structure, 164'x82', centered on three giant central towers at heights of 85' in the center and 75' on each side. For the additional stage set elements, Brilliant Stages oversaw the design and construction of seven 3D replicas of Robbie’s head, three at 23'-high and hydraulically automated, the entire onstage tracking solution, a multi-tiered main stage with protective roof, and the curved header topping the massive back wall.
Prolyte UK worked with Brilliant to supply the large header that comprised a series of custom elements, including curved lengths of Prolyte S52SV truss, suspension and angle brackets, pyro mounting points, and light boxes for LED battens. The whole system was finished in gold to match the rest of the set.
“The show demanded a lot of heavy set pieces, and Brilliant’s use of simple technology and good build quality made it very straightforward to construct and reliable to tour,” Roberts says. Tony Bowern, Brilliant Stages’ general manager, adds, “We kept the mechanics simple, choosing to use hydraulic drive solutions over electronic elements wherever possible to guarantee the wagons performed seamlessly for all shows. This lent maximum robustness and durability to the set, increasing its road-worthiness and weather resistance on tour.”
Massive Lighting
The outdoor elements were an important consideration for the lighting as well, including the lack of darkness. “The biggest issue was knowing that we would be playing in Northern Europe during mid-summer,” says Williams. “This is death for lighting, and the worst thing a designer can do is carry on in denial of the fact that it’s not going to get dark until two-thirds into the show. In the spirit of turning a weakness into a strength, I set about conceiving a show that would actually benefit from opening in daylight. I thought about outdoor entertainments that are invariably day-lit—carnivals, parades, etc. From this, I took the cue as to what kind of show we needed to design.”
Williams’ rig itself was integrated into the set so it appeared to be deceptively minimalistic: 130 PRG Bad Boy Spots, 138 Martin Professional MAC Auras, 69 Atomic Strobes with Atomic Color scrollers, 12 Zap Technology BigLites, 12 Novalight Nova Flowers, along with additional lighting fixtures. He selected the Bad Boys as his primary source for their output, saying, “In a stadium—never mind in daylight—it’s all about intensity. None of the subtle features of a fixture count for anything at all if you can’t see it so, in many ways, the brightest fixture wins. The Bad Boy is still the brightest fixture in its price range. Other fixtures, like the Atomic strobes and DWEs, are scenic elements as much as they are lighting instruments, so many of the choices were made on this basis. Even though we have a lot of fixtures, due to the scale, we have very few different types; it was a very simple rig, really.”
Where possible, the lighting was pre-rigged for efficiency, such as under the band area roof where the designer mainly used MAC Auras. PRG worked with Brilliant so that 65 of the MAC Auras could be permanently mounted onto U-beam. This meant that all the cabling was hidden inside the U-beam, which then attached to the main structural beams of the roof that had 10 spines coming out from the central truss. It took only a half hour at load-in to attach the U-beams and plug it all together. Williams, not always a fan of LED fixtures, was happy with the Auras. “They’re lightweight enough to be able to fix directly to the structure and put out minimal heat so can be close to the artist,” he says. “These fixtures were very much in the picture, so they needed to look good. The round, uniform-colored face is quite pleasant, as opposed to other LED fixtures that look like color-blindness test cards.”
Another time-saver was the use of PRG BAT Truss throughout much of the rig. Roberts points out that, as a production manager, he liked BAT Truss for the space it saved, “but even more for the time it saved me,” he says. “My lighting crew moved so fast that they ended up having to wait for the next staging, scenic, or video sections to be built so they could move on. The lighting pieces were so well pre-rigged that they went in extremely quickly. It was a very slick operation.”
Control was handled using two MA Lighting grandMA2 consoles and two MA Lighting grandMA2 lights. The entire lighting package was provided by Production Resource Group (PRG). “I knew that PRG could provide the gear,” states Roberts. “They have supported Robbie’s shows for a long time and are great to work with. They also really came through with a great crewing solution for us.” Roberts continued by noting, “I have to say I was blessed with an entire crew that was great on every part of this tour. 90% of the success of any production is the people, and I had the best team out there.”
Williams, when asked about challenges of the design, concludes, “Pretty much everything about this show was a challenge. We debuted the world’s first portable, asymmetrical, three-dimensional LED screen, on vast scale. Large areas of the stage were traversed by roadways to carry seven-ton mobile set pieces, and we had a performer who needed to be able to get as close to his audience as possible. Apart from that, it was business as usual.”
Sadly, only a week after the tour’s opening, legendary designer and architect Mark Fisher died after a long illness. His design for Robbie Williams was yet another example of his groundbreaking and transformative work during his decades of concert design. Robbie Williams dedicated his June 25 show in Glasgow, Scotland to the memory of Fisher.