USA - Donald Glover’s recently completed The New World Tour was his last run of shows as the Grammy-winning artist Childish Gambino before he retired that stage persona.
“The idea of the whole tour was to build a world – The New World, as a sort of parallel universe, conveying a feeling of high tech but LOFI,” says production designer Tobias Rylander. “The world was to be dystopian and futuristic, not revealing if we’re headed toward darker times, or if we have just come out of them. It is a world where technology is modern but broken – and a world of not so high resolution.”
Lit by a carefully curated collection of fixtures, including the Chauvet Professional PXL Curve, this show opens with Gambino appearing on one of the two side stages dressed in a futuristic space suit surrounded by smoke, lights and laser beams. As he begins his song, lasers project his face onto a crystalline display. Over the main stage, a giant 3D LED setup seems to float in the air with individual rods, continuously moving and switching colours during the artist’s performance.
Rylander noted: “Our client knew he wanted a holographic light instrument in the middle of the venue. This led to the creation of what we called The Light Binder, a 3D kinetic sculpture that seamlessly weaves together 1024 LED sticks, each with 80 pixels as well as video content. The centrepiece really turns to every side of the house and audience, making everyone feel part of the world we created and immersing them in it. Regardless of where you are sitting, you really find yourself face to face with both the artist, and the art.”
Brandon Epperson programmed the 512-universe Light Binder centrepiece in TouchDesigner assisted in preproduction coding by Tommy Etkin, and during rehearsal tool building by Crystal Jow. “It was my focus and adopted child for the two months,” Epperson said of the centrepiece. “We had to move 3D sampling volume runs in real time, not pre-rendered. Trim heights city to city had to be adjusted to the overall scaling as well as crowd and camera safety limits. I’m very proud of what The Light Binder became. We felt like we were just starting to really figure out possibilities when we had to kick it out of the nest.”
Expanding the immersive aura of the tour’s evolving world was the Chauvet Professional PXL Curve, which animated the runway and B-stage. Like other fixtures in this three-stage 3D set, these motorised battens were super-charged with pixel mapping, including video content.
“In The New World, I wanted lighting, video and lasers all to feel mechanical and technological, as well as organic – all at the same time,” said Rylander. “We use video and pixel mapping all over the place. We use organic video content and textures on every pixel in the show. In a way, you might say that I didn’t even pick the colours; I just let them happen and have their own life.”
Programmed by Joe Lott, with Davey Martinez as its touring LD and Danny Purdue as its video programmer, the show benefited from highly skilled people drawing on an extensive variety of tools.
“On this tour, one of the things that really excited us was to be able to use live camera and 3D capture on the moving 3D plane,” said Rylander. “It took a lot of people doing a lot of thinking before we had all the tools in the box needed to realise the design to its fullest. We use everything from direct DMX programming from the lighting console, both for positioning lighting and effects, through D3 and Notch – Disguise and Touch Designer, sometimes all at once to achieve some of the looks.”
