Live Design chats with Henk-Jen Blok, technical applications specialist, at Follow-Me (distributed in the US by AC Americas, and their advanced performer tracking systems. He will be teaching a full-day class, Follow-Me 3D Training Workshop, at LDI 2025 on Friday, December 5 in Las Vegas.
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Live Design: What are your day-to-day tasks?
Henk-Jen Blok: I work closely with our clients, partners, users, and our product management. My daily tasks include supporting system integration, providing technical training, offering customer support, and collaborating with our product team to continuously improve our tracking solutions.
LD: What are the challenges for performer tracking systems?
HJB: Performer tracking systems operate in high pressure and sometimes complex live environments, where precision is key. This knowledge present opportunities for innovation. Key considerations to counter challenges in this field include maintaining consistent accuracy across dynamic stage setups, adapting to different venue sizes and show formats, and ensuring smooth integration with lighting consoles, immersive audio systems and media servers. Another important aspect to counter challenges in this field, is designing a system that’s intuitive and user-friendly, enabling both technicians and creatives to easily incorporate performer tracking into their workflows. As productions become more ambitious, performer tracking systems are rising to meet those demands with flexible, modular solutions like our Follow-Me performer tracking systems.
LD: What are Follow-Me's solutions to meet these challenges?
HJB: Follow-Me offers a camera-based tracking system that give creatives and users complete control and flexibility. Our system allows both manual as well as auto-tracking, which provides redundancy and adaptability. Our systems’ dedicated software integrates with industry-standard lighting consoles and protocols, and we’ve focused heavily on making the user interface intuitive and customizable. Additionally, the ability to track multiple performers independently sets us apart in scalability and precision.
LD: What’s new in terms of products?
HJB: Our latest development is Follow-Me Track-iT, a system that allows automated performer tracking. It utilizes RF tags placed on performers, communicating with antennas across the performance area. Track-iT offers advanced precision for tracking multiple performers automatically across large stages or arenas.
We’re regularly releasing software updates for our systems to enhance the user experience, improve calibration workflows, the set-up wizard to support an easy start and we now offer expanded integration with lighting, audio and video control systems.
We’re constantly refining our products based on real-world feedback from venue installs, touring shows, broadcast events, and theatrical productions.
LD: What will people learn in your training workshop at LDI?
HJB: Participants will join our Follow-Me fundamentals training to gain practical, hands-on experience with the Follow-Me 3D manual performer tracking system, while also being inspired by real-world user cases that highlight how performer tracking technology enhances not only creative possibilities but also the overall workflow and working environment. An initial glimps of Follow-Me Track-iT will also be shown.
The practical part of the course will get the participants behind the system giving them the fundamentals of how to prepare, setup, calibrate, fine tune and integrate a Follow-Me 3D manual performer tracking system with hands-on tuition and learning. Plenty of time is factored in to give attendees time to learn, practice, explore and ask questions.
They’ll explore how to track multiple performers with one set up, troubleshoot effectively, and apply industry best practices.
LD: Who is the target audience for this course?
HJB: This course is ideal for lighting designers, lighting programmers, technicians, follow spot operators and production managers, anyone involved in planning and executing live productions for light, audio and video and who wants to explore the benefits of performer tracking.
Whether you're new to performer tracking technology or already have experience with Follow-Me, this session offers valuable insights combined with practical, hands-on learning.
LDL Any exciting projects Follow-Me have been involved with lately?
Absolutely, the Follow-Me system is trusted by productions and venues all over the world, across a wide range of scales and genres.
From intimate and emotionally powerful singer-songwriter performances like the Miss Li Tour in Scandinavia this summer, to large-scale illusion spectacles such as the Ehrlich Brothers shows in Germany (this fall in the U.S.), our technology supports diverse creative visions.
We’re proud to have played a role in the legendary Diana Ross's Sacred Memories Tour, enhancing the elegance of her performances with seamless performer tracking. The Follow-Me system is in use during the Kane Brown tour with an epic lighting rig.
In most theatres, Follow-Me is (often permanently) installed to form a flexible, creative (and economical) multitool. For example, Walnut Street Theater in Philadelphia uses Follow-Me 3D and Follow-Me Track-iT on all their shows.
On the stadium scale, Ed Sheeran, Imagine Dragons, ACDC, Counting Crows, Billie Eilish, James Taylor, Mary J Blige, Greenday, and Beyonce are perfect examples of Follow-Me’s capability to handle complex, multi-performer tracking across massive stages, that often expand in the air, with real-time accuracy.
These are bits and pieces of our systems at work. We are so proud our systems are the workhorses to realize these creative visions, amazing show designs and lighting teams. And there are many more exciting projects, installs and shows around the globe on tour, ongoing and coming up. If you would like to see more, find Follow-Me Tracking Solutions on social media. Or go to our website: follow-me.com
LD: What is the ultimate goal of Follow-Me?
We at Follow‑Me want to bring more than just an innovative performer tracking system, we want to enable creativity, power experiences, and facilitate the next generation of live performances with our tracking solutions. And we would like to share that knowledge and interact with our users.
Follow-Me 3D Training Workshop at LDI 2025: Friday, Dec 5 at 09:30am-5:30pm, Price: $569 ($669 after 10/14) Lunch included.
USE PROMO CODE FOLLOWME FOR A 50% DISCOUNT WHEN YOU REGISTER-LIMITED TIME ONLY.
Follow-Me at LDI: AC Americas booth #2329