CMU School of Drama


Monday, March 02, 2020

Watch This Insane Timelapse Video of Rammstein's Stage Being Built

Consequence of Sound: Rammstein’s stage setup is no joke. The German industrial metal act shared a timelapse video that shows just how much work goes into constructing the massive structure.

6 comments:

Emily Brunner (Bru) said...

This is an insane timelapse video of a load in for a concert of metal band in Europe. I always forget how much stuff traveling concerts bring to stadiums across the country. This show has an excessive amount of stuff though. The linearrays alone must take up 2 trucks and weigh a lot. The pyro is insane as well. I wonder if the 500 people who help with load in and out are sourced locally from each location, or if they follow the tour across the country with the trucks and musicians. If they do travel, the logistics of that alone must be hard. I cannot imagine the money either. Now I understand why tickets for concerts are so expensive, even for the nosebleed seats way up high in a football stadium. To break even on a kind of show like this requires a huge price hike in tickets. I've contemplated touring shows and concerts as a career, but after watching this video, I am not so sure. I do value sleep sometimes. But also, it would be incredible to be apart of something as big as this.

Magnolia Luu said...

That was truly crazy to behold. The amount of work that can get done in 60 hours is mind-boggling when given so many hands and such precise organization. I have to give extreme props to the managers on this project for being able to take on a project so huge with such accuracy and time management. Seeing where they began with a bare field and some squares of metal it was especially insane to see the end product with lights and pyro. I've never heard of Rammstein and I'm not a fan of metal; however, I would put aside my significantly differing taste in music for the opportunity to experience that setup. Knowing that they're about to have a tour in North America maybe I'll attempt to see them. The fact that only a certain number of trucks can load in at a time had never occurred to me and that added another step of unseen organization that I wasn't expecting there to be.

Alexa Janoschka said...

Wow, that is a very interesting looking stage, I honestly don’t know how to feel about it. I LOVE TIMELAPSES! A lot of planning went into the construction of this stage (I think that is oversimplifying this project). ummmmmmm…“Full-on pornographic music video”… this is a linked video?? Do I open a link?? Nope, I’m good. OK, that video was AWESOME, I had to watch it twice. There is so much that goes into building this stage!!!!!!!!!! I want to see more time lapses of stages being built! I don’t know what the design of these stages is supposed to be, but I will say it is very interesting to look at. Seeing the start and finish of the project was probably the coolest part of the video. (I didn’t realize that they had to lay a whole deck over the field. I also never thought about the trucking industry and having to transport and load in all of the equipment (there is so much that people don’t realize)

Dean Thordarson said...

This time lapse was absolutely breathtaking. At this point, I expect nothing less than utter insanity with these touring music acts. From my very early days of being a theatre technician, I have found myself entranced by load in time lapses. I have watched every time lapse that I have been able to find, many more than once. What I enjoyed about this particular time lapse was the video quality and the multiple angles. Most other time lapses I have watched are a static camera that is fairly low resolution. The videos are still great to watch, but you don’t get to see nearly as much as in the time lapse of the Rammstein load in. For one, you get a chance to see all the semi-trucks waiting in a queue outside the stadium waiting to go in, and it really gives you a sense of just how compact they are able to condense these immense sets. It also shows the real time passage of hours, which shows an interesting contrast between the sixty-one hours it took to set everything up, versus the four and a half hours it takes for them to strike it all. The way I am able to put that into perspective is that they can strike that entire stage and be on the road in just over the length of one of our crew calls here. Granted, they have four hundred people working on the same strike, and are repeating the same strike over and over, but regardless – absolutely incredible.

DJ L. said...

I absolutely love to watch time lapse videos of stages and concerts being set up. Every year, one of the coolest versions of these videos that I look forward to seeing is the time lapse of the Super Bowl setup and strike. It is always amazing what they do in order to make such a large rig and stage be able to be setup up in just about six minutes. This however, is unbelievable. This stage is absolutely enormous. It is amazing to watch what kind of heavy machinery is used to erect the stage structure. It is even amazing to watch the handful of trucks with cranes mounted on them lay the flooring during day one. Then to watch the two truck mounted cranes and boom lifts pull in to erect the stage is even more amazing. I hope to one day be able to work on a stage this large.

Elinore Tolman said...

Oh, what the cost of this setup may be. Rammstein has always had a reputation for their live performances being absolutely insane on every level, which makes sense because of the music they play. I shouldn’t have been surprised by the setup with this background information, and yet my jaw dropped when watching the video. The fact that such a massive beast of a stage with so many special effects was put up in only a week floors me to no end. Being a technician on the show must be an absolute blast to do. It’s crazy just how much spectacle can be put into one simple concert. It goes to show just with the right amount of passion (and money) for the performance, you have the ability to pull off a live performance larger than life. It definitely looks like Rammstein earns their reputation and Du Hast must be a blast to see on that stage.