For “Weird Al” Yankovic’s BIGGER & WEIRDER Tour, Lighting Designer Jamie Fadden created a super-sized concert experience with support from Hog control.
The production puts on five shows a week, moving through a variety of venues across North America. Fadden says scaling the show to different stages has been manageable because of how she has organized her programming, including the use of plots in Hog.
On the current tour, Fadden is running a Tour Hog as the main console, with a Stage Hog serving as backup. BIGGER & WEIRDER is the first tour she’s used the newest Hog hardware on. A long-time Hog user, she programmed much of the show at home on her Hog 4 setup before moving it to the newer desks. Thankfully, that transition was smooth.
Quick adaptability is part of what drew Fadden deeper into the Hog ecosystem in the first place. Before switching to Hog, she had worked on other platforms and was used to moving between different desks depending on what was in-house. Hog, she said, made sense for the way she works.
Having her own desk at home proved helpful, too. “It gave me the opportunity to get more creative because I could experiment with things in my own time,” Fadden said. She also appreciates that Hog feels straightforward. “There’s not 12,000 ways to do one thing.”
Simplified workflows with a lot of creative control are essential on a show that Fadden describes as the hardest she has ever done. Some songs contain dense, tightly timed cue stacks, including an encore sequence currently sitting at 111 cues and another medley section with around 90 cues.
Concert lighting always requires tight timing, but with a Weird Al show, that is especially true to make sure the punchlines land. If a bump, blackout, or reveal is even slightly off, the joke can lose its impact. For example, Fadden described one recurring bit in “eBay” where the timing of a light cue and the performer response have to line up just right.
That makes her role both technical and performative. While much of the show is built around cue stacks, Fadden is still actively driving moments in real time. She keeps bump buttons ready for drum hits, blinders, and other on-the-fly accents. She doesn’t run the show on timecode. Instead, she jokes, she is “human timecode.”
The video content adds another layer of complexity to her design choices. Because Weird Al’s show incorporates plenty of screen content, including bright, swirling, rainbow-heavy visuals, Fadden often has to decide how lighting should coordinate with what is happening on the wall without overwhelming the stage picture. She’ll often pull one or two colors from the video content and build the lighting look around that theme.
Festivals, she said, are “a whole other beast.” At Bonnaroo, Fadden got her first real introduction to Hog’s newer cloning workflow while adapting the show to a festival rig. The process came with a few fixture-specific challenges, but she said it ultimately worked out and expects the next festival outing to be easier.
Overall, moving to the new Hog hardware has been a smooth transition. One of the appeals of the hardware is the physical feel. Fadden says the faders are “nice and smooth.” For someone who thinks visually, the color coding on the desk has also been useful.
Fadden shared that her nine-year-old daughter recently helped run lights for Puddles Pity Party, an accompanying act with Weird Al. The colored faders made it simple to give clear instructions. When the moment came, she could tell her which red fader to push. That’s just one example of how the desk design aligns with programmer instincts.
In a production where timing can make or break the moment, Fadden has leaned on Hog to scale from venue to venue, adapt to festival rigs and dynamic video content, all while allowing her to stay hands-on during the show.
To learn more about the Hog family of consoles, visit www.etcconnect.com/Hog