The scantily clad Pussycat Dolls just wrapped the European leg of the Doll Domination Tour in support of a new album of the same name, with Scott Warner serving as lighting designer, director, and programmer for the tour. While the group is now touring the US in support of Britney Spears, Warner's design will be out again for the Asian and Australian legs later this year.
“I like being in total control of my show, be it bad or good,” says Warner. “A designer hiring a programmer to program a show for someone else to run it is strange to me.” Warner was going for a slick high-tech look for this tour, with a clean symmetrical stage.
“This show has to be a little brighter when the extra male dancers join the Dolls,” he adds. “I hate — and I do mean hate — spotlights. I think they just kill any kind of look you have on the stage, but I understand why they are needed. This is my first tour using truss spots, which help get rid of the spillage from the usual house spots onto our set, so it's much better.”
For his lighting rig, Warner uses mostly primary colors — “red, amber, blue, mauve, green, yellow,” he says. “I'm big on green. In the '90s, people always asked me why I like green. Now, it's becoming popular. Granted, it doesn't look good on the girls' faces. I once had a heavy metal band looking to hire me since they liked the way I use green.”
For his fixtures, Warner has a rig of mostly Robe moving lights, including six DigitalSpot 7000DTs, 36 RedWash 3-192 LEDs, and 12 Robe RedBlinder 2-96s, as well as 48 ColorSpots and 12 ColorWash 2500E ATs. He also has five Vari-Lite VL3000s, 41 Martin Professional Atomic Strobes, and eight Mole Richardson 8-Lites.
“My main goal is to provide a big look with the least amount of fixtures,” he says, noting that his truss design is based around four truss pods, two static underneath the front truss and two moving, plus a circular truss center stage and a smaller semicircular truss. In the upstage left and right corners are two 20' runs of Tomcat Swing Wing truss flown diagonally, while a back truss runs the full width of the stage. Motion control for the rig is via a Kinesis system. “Pods on trusses are packed with fixtures that make it look like there are more lights than we really use,” Warner says, adding that the Robe RedWash LEDs — “an awesome piece of equipment” — and the Martin Professional Atomic Strobes are his workhorses.
Warner also co-designed the aluminum set with Bryan “Froggy” Cross. “We've been working together for so long that we seem to always know what each of us wants,” Warner says. “The Robe RedWash LEDs really make our set pop. I love having an aluminum set, since lighting it is fun, but sometimes I wish it was black as it does reflect any sort of light.”
Using the Robe DigitalSpot 7000DTs flown below the two front truss pods for both lighting and video, content is projected on an 8' stainless steel globe. Warner built his color palette for lighting around the colorful custom video clips, some of which he created himself in Adobe After Effects, while Los Angeles-based Stimulated handled content for the 21.5'×12' Nocturne V-Lite center screen. Two side screens are used for I-Mag content, and playback is from two Doremi Labs Nugget HD video players that run via timecode generated from Cross' ProTools setup.
Warner runs the show from an MA Lighting grandMA console, and he did minimal preprogramming using the grandMA visualizer. “I had zero time to program this tour, basically 30 hours,” he says. “I wanted to program at home with my grandMA, but by the time the music was ready to go, my console had to be shipped.”
Vendors for the European leg of the tour included HSL, Nocturne Video, Britannia Row, and Pyro Junkies. ShowFX provided props, and Lite Structures built the set.