One Direction On The Road Again Tour content from Live Design: Tait has worked on many projects in the past with the team members who worked on the new One Direction On The Road Again 2015 Tour, which includes creative director Lee Lodge, set designers Stufish, and lighting designer Paul Normandale. Conversations for the tour design started in 2013, and that's when Tait got inovled. We caught up with Matthew Hales, senior project manager for Tait, about the tour.
4 comments:
This tour design sounds very exciting and I wish I had a chance to see it. It is also awesome to see that Tait Towers doing innovative things like this and pushing the standard. I also found it interesting that they were willing “integrate existing equipment form our rental inventory into a new configuration for a production”. I personally think it’s great that they are practical sound business individuals who also are invested in beautiful technical design. One of the reasons I liked this article is because the conversation included talk with how Tait Towers worked with the designer, something that I feel is often closed off to the public. It was interesting to hear how their installation process worked, particularly because I am interested in tour management and this has everything to do with that. Finally, I enjoyed hearing that we are learning the industry standard and seeing how they use it in action.
First of all, it's time to stop giving people grief for working on teeny-bopper shows. You want to see a dedicated crowd who('s parents) will pay a boatload of money for tickets? Bands like One Direction are the way to go. So what if you disagree that its good music. That's besides the point. These concerts are huge headliners and are a great platform for your work. Now, on to the article itself. It's great to see artist using a wide variety of video screens in their designs. With rapidly advancing technology, we have the capabilities of moving screens up and down lifts. Like Ben said, it's great to get in the head of the designers and hear about their processes and how it all works behind the scenes. It's easy to get caught up in the spectacle of it all, and it's even easily to get caught up trying to figure out "how they did it". After seeing what the designers came up with just using AutoCAD, it's comical comparing it to what we use it for here. I mean, I'm drawing flats. They're drawing entire concerts. It truly is killing a fly with a hammer.
This concert design seems really cool, and really effective for a rebranding of a show. I think that it’s great that they tried to reuse a lot of stock material and parts of the old set in order to cut down on costs. This set and the old one do look pretty similar, but I think that’s it different enough that no one will care and that it’s worth the savings in the cost of building an entirely new design (especially considering that they need to pay to ship it to Australia). I think it’s interesting that this wasn’t built entirely by Tait Towers, and I wish that the article had gone into more depth on who did what. I feel like two different companies collaborating on something that can be as complex as a concert would be pretty difficult, and I wonder why they decided to do that. Also, each company had some automation stuff happening, which I found weird. I would have thought it would be easier to have one software control all of the automation for the show. Does that mean that they need two automation board ops to run it? It just seems like something that shouldn’t have been divided up.
It is exciting to see a company we (CMU) have such good connections with doing such big things. I know Tate is a huge company that does this size show often, but to read about everything that they do just for one show is incredible. I think the part that surprises me most about this entire article is that no one from Tait travels with the Tour. I know the stage hands that do travel with the show must have an unbelievable understanding of the systems but I would still expect that someone who designed to built the systems would be with them incase something goes wrong. Yes, people can fly out to wherever the concert is, but I would want someone with the show 24/7. The other aspect that keeps surprising me, but I knew, is how many different companies work on one show. I know companies have different strengths but wouldn’t it be easier for one group to do it all?
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