This summer, The Killers completed a residency at The Colosseum at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas, which is rather fitting seeing how the band is originally from Vegas. Handling lighting duties was the band’s longtime Lighting Designer, Steven Douglas of Craorag Lighting, working with Production Designer Mitchell Schellenger of Station Six, who is new to the band’s team. The two created just the right Vegas vibe for this hometown residency. They also worked closely with PRG Projects to create some custom LED solutions for the massive Vegas-inspired scenic elements.
While Douglas has been lighting The Killers for nearly two decades, it was the first time Schellenger worked with the band, and the first time he’d worked with Douglas on a project. “I’ve never worked with Steven, but I’ve known him for a long time since we both do lighting for rock bands of similar genres,” says Schellenger. “He and I would run into each other at festivals all over the world when I was touring with Imagine Dragons. Getting to finally work on this project together was great. I think we worked really well together and it was a lot of fun.”
Douglas agrees, “It was great. Mitchell came in to do the set design and he did a great job. We were knee deep in trying to design The Killers’ arena tour already when this Vegas residency came up, so we were looking for other people to work with on the residency. Mitchell was easy to work with and being a lighting designer as well we speak a lot of the same lingo and have a lot of the same shorthand.”
Many people don’t know that Schellenger went to college for architecture. He’s always had an obsession with various types of architecture, and when he’s on the road for work, loves getting opportunities to go look at architectural things. “The town is very important to Brandon Flowers, the singer for The Killers,” he notes. “In doing my research on the band, I found articles where he discusses the vibe of the town, especially old Vegas. He mentioned how much he loves the signage, the light bulbs, and all that. It was fun that we got to go somewhat on the nose with this one to really capture the essence of the city and put it on stage, especially as the residency is actually in Vegas. Since I am a lighting designer first, when I do scenic design, there is a lot of lighting on the set, and this one is no exception. There were over 3,000 custom LED lamps in the set mimicking Vegas-style signage.”
As the stage in The Colosseum is 120’ wide, there is a lot of real estate to fill with scenery and video screens. To understand how massive the stage actually is, Schellenger points out what happened when the Neon Museum in Las Vegas reached out and offered the production the opportunity to use some of their vintage pieces in the show. “We were going to try and put something from the museum in the show, but from a scale standpoint, everything felt too small on that massive stage,” explains Schellenger. “We felt we weren’t doing the pieces justice. In the lobby, to set the mood for the fans, we did ended up using a replica of the Vegas Vic sign that was graciously provided to us for free from the Neon Museum. It is hard to understand the sense of scale until you step into the room. Most people are used to a 40’x60’ area in an arena; this space was double that. It’s two arena shows side by side in terms of width.”
Old Las Vegas
The designer knew that leaning into a real Vegas-centric design would give the band a comfortable sense of their hometown. “When we design stage shows, we want to create an environment for them to perform within that doesn’t just look cool, but really makes them feel comfortable in the space,” Schellenger says. “I kept coming back to the fact that we needed to make this feel like something at first glance—it’s in Vegas; it’s meant for Vegas; and it’s meant for a Vegas band. The shape—both of the I-Mag screens as well as the main portal in the middle—are based off the classic ‘Welcome to Las Vegas’ sign. We didn’t want to just have it be overly literal, so we approached it by embellishing it with an incandescent bulb look; to mimic the older Vegas signage. With that cool, marquee twinkle to it.”
With Schellenger’s habit of putting lights into his scenery, there are thousands of lamps built into his scenic Vegas-inspired signs, but they weren’t off the shelf, stock lamps. “My goal was to give Steven as many tools as he could have, so every bulb was individually controllable, which was a feat,” he continues. “In order to get that level of control, they needed to be 24V DC lamps, but still be the normal light bulb size, and look like a screw in incandescent bulb. So, the sign lamps themselves were custom made by Frederic Opsomer and his team at PRG Projects just for this show. They are LED, but we had to make sure that the color temperature was what we wanted, and that there was no flicker, even lower down on the dimmed curve, that you get with cheap LED lights. So, they came up with a custom batch of LED bulbs that are all individually controllable and warm white. Then to give Steven more to play with, the bulbs are all side lit with RGBW LED tape in all the lamp coves. And, of course, the scenic signage elements have a neon flex product across the signs to give him additional RGBW capabilities. Everything is LED for practical purposes, but we wanted it to look as old school as possible.”
Schellenger enjoyed working with the PRG Projects team out of Belgium, where most of the fabrication started, then was finished at PRG’s scenic shop in Las Vegas prior to installation at Caeser’s Palace. “We worked with Frederic and the team from the Belgium office for most of it,” says Schellenger, “and it was ultimately finished in Las Vegas. But bits of it came from all over the world with initial material selection taking place out of the Belgium office. We lost count of how many people were involved from PRG Projects; some flew over to oversee the finish and installation. We came to them with very specific drawings and then discussed the materials. They were great in helping us find solutions such as the wiring to get individual control, getting the 24V DC bulbs, custom manufactured. Their team concluded that it would be better this way rather than the nightmare of power and cabling for 120V bulbs, even with the LED drivers. They also supplied us with a pallete of spare lamps. It wasn’t like we could run to Home Depot to get a spare LED bulb if we had one go out!”
Video Elements
In terms of the main video screen, the design team took advantage of The Colosseum’s in-house LED screen, which consists of 5.5mm LED panels and overall measures 110’ x 36’. “Luckily Caeser’s owns a ginormous LED screen upstage center, so we didn’t have to bring in any LED for the upstage portion,” states Schellenger. “The only LED we brought in was for the I-Mag surrounds, which were custom built to give them a unique shape. We used standard 500mm x 1,000mm 2.5mm LED panels inside the custom surrounds; there was no need to fabricate custom LED panels.” Brooklyn-based SRND Studio provided the content for the residency shows. SRND worked with Creative Director Warren Fu, who worked with the band to realize their vision of the content. Video and LED products were supplied by Big Picture for the residency shows.
In terms of I-Mag, much of it was left clean with little effects applied to the feed. “Since we had dedicated I-Mag surfaces left and right, every song had a clean feed going to the I-Mag screens,” says Schellenger. “We did a couple of songs that were slightly manipulated, but not too much. We didn’t want to go overboard with Notch or make it too digital just from an aesthetic standpoint. We were trying to stay with our old school Vegas vibe, so we felt clean I-Mag on the sides made sense. SRND created a few PIPs (Picture-In-Picture) areas for I-Mag to appear on the upstage LED wall. The set was restrictive of the content, to some degree, and that was by design. We didn’t want to have a giant, rectangular video screen with some perimeter scenery. The scenery was very much at the forefront, so some of the content wouldn’t necessarily work from a sightline standpoint. We provided SRND with 3D models of the set and theater to help them in developing their content, and really have a sense of the real estate in the theater; what would work in terms of sightlines. We also built 3D assets specifically for the content creation; digital scenery to act as set extensions. We gave SRND the geometry they could use for screen content to help blend with the look of the practical scenery. There are quite a few moments where it all ties together.”
Vendor Support
Schellenger admits that there are “a lot of great companies that do really good scenic work”, and that “the choice for this show was quite hard,” he recalls. “I knew it was going to be an involved build and I needed somebody who would nail it, and that there were several choices that would be the right choice to make this happen. But ultimately, PRG seemed very passionate about what they do. After we looked through the drawings and renderings apart from the ‘yes, we can do it’ comments, you could just see the excitement in their eyes. They wanted to be involved in it, they wanted to make this thing great. Apart from costs and logistics, seeing when people are excited about a project, that to me speaks volumes. It’s easy for me to say that because it’s not my money, but creatively, I think we always get the best results when the team involved is enjoying what they’re doing. It’s always a goal of mine to see smiling faces on these shows that we all together have the pleasure of working on because that means everybody have a good time and it just makes the results that much better. With PRG, we knew we were in good hands and that we were going to be taken care of.”
The special effects for the show were supplied by Strictly FX, who has supported The Killers for quite a few years. “The band has a lot of input on the special effects,” says Schellenger. “They identify the songs for confetti, the ones for pyro, etc. They finalize the color choices.” Douglas concurs with Schellenger on the special effects, adding “We have a little tradition with certain cues have pyro, some with confetti, and some with lasers. So, this being a celebration of 20 years since their debut album, Hot Fuss came out, we thought we’d do all of them! We had confetti on four songs, then songs with pyro, then some with lasers. For the first half of the show, we played the entire Hot Fuss album from start to finish, which means the second song is ‘Mr. Brightside’, which is normally the biggest song of the show, and saved for the encore, where we go wild with lasers. You normally don’t go too crazy too soon. That’s the same with ‘Somebody Told Me’, which is another big hit that normally has lasers, but it came fourth in this set list. We did some laser songs that we normally wouldn’t play in the regular set—‘On Top’ and ‘Midnight Show’, both of which are played rarely nowadays, so we gave them a little laser treatment as well. It was a lot of fun.”
For this Killers’ residency, a lot of the show revolved around the scenic portals and large video elements. In terms of lighting, Douglas had a lot of lights—between the in-house lighting equipment and the supplemental gear he brought in from the lighting vendor, Christie Lites. “The lighting was more about finding opportunities than anything else,” explains Douglas. “It’s such a big video wall; it’s a feature of the building, so you’ve got to embrace it. It’s quite a content heavy show, but that’s fine and not a problem. We had enough firepower up there to compete anyway. It was about finding those moments. If we had a big, wide, cinema-esque moment, then I flew the rig up, out of the way and did things from above or from the floor and the sides. But, if we had content that was more particle-based, that gave us the opportunity to drop trusses in and sculpt around the content and around the set. The problem with flying is if you have a full screen video wall and you start flying trusses in front of it, it’s going to be very obvious that they’re there. So, when we had content that had a lot more negative space in it, or particle-based, we could fly the trusses in and they would fade into the black of the screen, even when content was running.”
In terms of floor lights, Douglas had a lot of lumens available for when he needed it, “We had 32 [Ayrton] Cobra2 units and 12 [Martin MAC] Ultra Performances on the floor,” comments the designer. “I always had enough firepower on the floor. The Cobra2, which is the new laser head, were in banks of eight—eight stage left, out in the wing, eight stage right, and then two sets of eight behind the band. They were particularly effective for use with a mirror ball. For the song, ‘Believe Me Natalie’, we have a mirror ball cue in it, and the Cobra2s definitely came into their own on that song. Then we had the entire interior edge of the portal lined with 32 Chauvet [COLORado] PXL Curve 12s with their 12 individual moving heads. There were pretty cool on some cues; they were able to really punch through that hole. Also, you could turn them on, point them up, and zoom out in a color and create a kind of James Turrell-esque feel of light that filled in the center of the portal, which was really cool. They have a really good zoom on them, so we were able to do some nice, big beam shapes and movements with them.”
The lighting team dialed the house rig back a lot of the time, so they were really able to beef up the lighting in some of the bigger moments. The house rig includes Vari-Lite VL3000s and VL3500s, Coemar Affinity Washes, and Robe MegaPointes. “The MegaPointes particularly were the thing we used quite a bit; the majority of them were hung on side torms stage left and right, so it was great for cross shots into cameras,” states Douglas. “A lot of the cameras in the pit looked across the stage at an angle, so it gave us a nice fill into that black hole you always see off stage. Then we brought in nine pods, each pod had four Martin Ultra Performances, three Martin PXL Washes, and two GLP JDC1 strobes. The nine pods were on a Kinesys automation system, and we were able to fly them in and out as needed, which also gave us the ability to sculpt the rig around the set as well, because it’s obviously quite angular being based on the shape of the sign. That was the starting point for it really; to make sure that we could sculpt the rig and drop it in when we needed to have impact, and then also fly out high when we had those big video, and big set moments. There are so many lighting elements built into the set as well that no matter what arrangement or configuration the rig was in, we were going to have enough there to play with anyway.”
Precise Control
When it came time to control the thousands of LED lamps, and the many feet of LED tape on the scenic portals and elements, Douglas had his work cut out for him. Some key tech support made that easier. “We had individual control over every LED lamp in the scenery,” points out Douglas. “My Front of House Tech, Chris Pederson, made layout views for every single bulb so that we could bitmap them. It was a time-consuming process for him; it took a couple of days to lay it all out properly, but he did a great job. I was able to just come in and run bitmaps across it all, and it worked perfectly. The custom LED bulbs were pure white; just to give us that classic Vegas look. Then we lined everything with RGBW LED tape so that we could get some color out of the set as well. Obviously, playing with dimmer levels on the bulbs gave us differences in the amber range as well.”
The lighting on the scenery also matches the custom keyboard stand that Douglas designed and had fabricated for the residency shows. “For a long time we’ve had a custom keyboard stand that I designed for almost every tour,” says the designer, “but for this show we reverted back to an old classic, which was the ‘K’. It started life as just three dimmer channels and 68 bulbs. We expanded when I designed this new version and was built by Kevin Largent of Largent Studios in Brooklyn. In this version, I designed a load of external neon lining on the face of it. Then we had a load of LED across the back. There’s a silver panel behind the bulbs. All in all, it’s over 5,000 parameters over 11 DMX universes for a keyboard stand!”
In addition to the lighting design duties, Douglas was also the Lighting Director for the Las Vegas residency shows; a role he handles for The Killers’ regular tours as well. He operates the show entirely manual, with no timecode. “They’re a live band,” says Douglas. “Every now and then, they’ll want to talk to the audience in the middle of the show. They’ll add a breakdown here, or double a solo, shorten this bit, or change the ending. We had one timecode cue for a piece of video in the show, but we don’t use it anymore as they don’t play that song.”
The Killers Las Vegas residency shows were well received, and hopefully, being Vegas-based, the band will return for more performances. No matter what, Schellenger and Douglas did an outstanding job bringing The Killers and their fans an old Vegas vibe that showcased the 20th Anniversary of their Hot Fuss album, as well as selections from the iconic act’s deep catalog. The music, the visuals, the design and The Killers on stage was certainly a winning hand for the lucky audiences.
Vendor View: PRG Projects
Frederic Opsomer, Managing Director
On the solutions PRG Projects brought to the production:
There was a lot of traditional scenery on this job, which was very beautifully designed by Mitchell Schellenger. The biggest challenge was producing the 24V DC LED bulbs with a warm white color temperature. Over 3,000 that had to be individually addressable, with all the power boxes integrated. We had these LED bulbs made to our specifications in China. PRG Projects has an office in Shenzhen China, and we have people on the ground there to go and negotiate with suppliers so we can have things built to our specs.
Other than the lamps, all the very large signage, portal wraps and big surrounds that went in front of the video screens were all built from scratch in Las Vegas. The biggest challenge with the surrounds was to build it so they looked very seamless and were still transportable. It had to be able to come in and out as needed at The Colosseum.
On supporting the creative team on this residency:
I have to say that they did a very good job in making all their drawings from the start. They were incredibly detailed, so we had little back and forth on the details. We spent hours discussing fabrics, brushed aluminum, brushed golds. Also, we went over the control of all the bulbs, which they wanted all to be individually addressable. Both Mitchell, Douglas, and their teams did a very good job in creating the drawing packages.
On why PRG Projects was the right vendor for this residency:
PRG Projects is very much focused on concert touring, and we have a lot of experience over the years with realizing concert touring projects for a wide range of designers. We are well established in Shenzhen and have relationships with all the vendors there to have things, like these bulbs, made to our specifications. By having a full-time person there overseeing the process really helps us with the quality of the products produced for us. All these different elements connected, making us a good partner for this project. We can pull global assets together to make these projects happen.
This was our first residency project, so there was a bit of discovery as we went along. We had to learn a couple of things, like the differences between working on a residency versus a tour. On a tour, anything you touch, your first thought is ‘how do I get this transported? How do I install it in a couple of hours?’ With a residency, the focus is different. You bring it from the shop to where it’s being installed, normally not that far. So, the truck pack and speed of installation are less of a concern. It’s a different approach to designing than a concert tour is. With a residency, there’s much more detail in the scenic finishes, because the audience is closer to it than to a touring set. It goes back to our theater roots.
This all adds to our overall experience at PRG Projects and is expertise that we can bring to future projects. I’m really looking forward to doing more of such projects in the future. With our years of experience, we are comfortable executing a project of this scale. This was a very interesting and a happy experience.
