Ray Winkler: Stufish And One Direction

Click to enlarge rendering A.

Ray Winkler, CEO of Stufish, the UK-based entertainment architecture firm, notes they designed One Direction’s 2014 Where We Are world tour, with a set featuring a skate park-like terrain with multilevel platforms and sloping ramps, a full LED video surface wrapping the background, and a large rising B-stage video lift. Back-to-back shows on this tour required a quick method of transporting and assembling the unique stage. The standard festival stage configuration was altered to improve sightlines by rotating the video wings by 20°.

When it was time for the band to go out again in 2015, the decision was made “not to do a whole new design,” notes Winkler, who was contacted by creative director Lee Lodge with a new direction for the latest One Direction tour. “They had hired a wonderful, young, hip London-based painter by the name of Kate Moross to create graphic designs to re-skin the fascia paneling on the set,” Winkler explains. The new artwork was integrated into the basic design for the 2014 tour.

The set has forced perspective—see rendering A—and as Winkler points out, “We added two stage ramps so the band members can run around, as they don’t dance. The LED screens wrap around the band to conceal as much of the festival stage as possible.”

Click to enlarge rendering B.

The new graphic images and corresponding video can clearly be seen in rendering B, along with the cube that rises on the B stage and has video content running on all four sides. “The cube rises like a garage door or an inverted blind,” says Winkler, “and has an LED ‘net’ as the screen that also rolls up like a blind.” Tait built the cube.

As Winkler sees it, the new images by Moross give the set, “a strong graphical presence, adding a secondary layer of geography to make it as intriguing as possible. At night, you hardly see the festival stage roof at all, and the surround panels have LED strips included for self-illumination. This was a clever way to update a set on a short schedule and pretty relentless tour dates,” he says. “It was easy to go from one tour to the next without a long rehearsal period on a new set with lifts, traps, and doors. The band has to sing and walk and you really want them to engage with something this three-dimensional. They were already comfortable with it.” 

Video content for the tour is by Geodezik. Upstaging is providing the US lighting system, with Lite Alternative supplying lighting in Europe, as well as the  control system worldwide. Sets and staging are by Tait and Brilliant Stages, with Kinesys for motion control of the moving light rig, and pyro and lasers are by Strictly FX.

Check out our full coverage, sponsored by Upstaging and Kinesys, at our Project In Focus on One Direction here, and check back often for continuing updates.