PLSN caught a look at Twenty One Pilots’ ongoing “Emotional Roadshow” tour, the band’s biggest tour to date. With a design that started just two short years ago, playing in club/theater size venues, the band has grown to play to sold out arenas, and their design has grown with it. We spoke to production, lighting and set designer Daniel Slezinger and lighting director/co-designer Tyler “Shap” Shapard about the current trek.
Daniel Slezinger
Production, Lighting & Set Designer
“Scalability was always in our thoughts — how to approach such a fast growing tour and still be able to keep an underlying production theme and show structure…Using custom LED video carts with lighting built into the carts, which weren’t dependent on rigging, gave the tour its own unique appearance, but more importantly, we could always have the content that [vocalist] Tyler Joseph wanted and still had lights in our show, even when we couldn’t hang anything in the air. This also helped us get away from the truss tower look when we still didn’t have that much product on the road yet. Once the tour grew to mostly arenas, we kept the carts but doubled the LED resolution, and then expanded the lighting and video concept without ever missing a beat and keeping the same show structure for the current album cycle.
“I love bouncing ideas around with Tyler Shapard. He’s a fast learner and a great guy all around. When he’s traveling, we try to keep up with each other over Skype and phone; I also travel to a good handful of the shows. We pass drawings and concepts back and forth until things make sense and [the design] is realistic — with the budget, and the amount of space we have in the trucks. Once Tyler joins me in previz, I usually work at night, when I have fewer distractions. Because Tyler programs during the day, it becomes a 24-hour operation and we become more efficient with the time we have to dial in the show elements. In total I spent 29 days in pre-viz for the ‘Emotional Roadshow.’ Sometimes we have as many as a thousand cues in one song. When we added production for the run in 2017, Tyler and I spent another week in previz, then a few days together in tech rehearsal before the tour started.”
Robe fixtures are a big part of the show, says Slezinger
“We fell in love with the Robe Pointes, so there are more of them than anything. We weren’t sure if they would keep up in the arena compared to the club shows, but they do very well, especially paired up with the BMFL’s and Robe 1200’s. On the video side, everything is Winvision Air 9, except the carts and the B-stage video floor are standard Win 9; everything is in factory frames.”
The tour is using Concert Investor for their lighting, video and rigging. Concert Investor, founded in 2007, is a production agency that works with both growing and established artists as well as production and technology vendors all around the world.
“Justin [Roddick, partner and co-founder of Concert Investor] and I try to build teams of people and companies that enjoy working together to be creative and efficient so that we can support and streamline the artist’s production needs globally.
“More than any light or video panel or special FX gag, the fans do bring the energy that we all feel at a Twenty One Pilots show. We’re all thankful for the amazing songs Tyler [Joseph] has written that allows so many to connect and come together. It’s been an amazing story and journey with these guys, and it still feels like the beginning!”
Tyler “Shap” ShapardLighting Director & Co-Designer
“When we first got together we needed a foundation for the album that we could build off of because we knew the rooms were getting bigger.
“Daniel and I used Skype to keep in touch while I was overseas, and when I came home for 8-10 days, we would schedule a programming session or meet with vendors, and then I would leave again and it would be back to Skype. There was no ‘off time’ leading up to and through this album for anyone.
“David Perkins with VER’s previz division was a big help to the success we had in the tours. He had some crazy deadline to supply us with complete previz rigs, and he made it happen! We usually plan some overlap to show each other what we have done and talk about what we need to do that day. We believe this gives us the ability to be creative in our own ways, and by bringing both of our different programming styles together, it makes our show more dynamic. It’s really a well-oiled machine.
“The six set carts were purchased as this foundation. They fit through a standard doorway and can crank up to 15 feet high. We also had an upstage truss and the ‘V’ truss flown. So after designing that, we did the first tour, and it was great, but it’s always fun and really challenging to add more to a finished show. The questions you ask yourself are, ‘What do I remove? What stays? If I take this element out, does it compromise the concept of the song or show?’
“So after the first tour, which was clubs and theaters, we went to amphitheaters and small-to-big arenas. We added a bunch of truss in the air [and] basically doubled all our lighting counts and tripled our budget. We also added an Audience truss [i.e., the “X”] in the room, projection I-Mag, and a B-stage, complete with a video floor and 40 lights surrounding it. Now we knew we could not do the B-stage everywhere, so we had to program all the B-stage songs also on the main stage. Which I think has been seen a handful of times.
“It’s actually some of the best programming I think we have ever done, but that’s how that goes, I guess. Plus, the ‘X’ had to be programmed in a way it wasn’t noticeable if it wasn’t there when we did amphitheaters. Then on this last leg, we added the audience dasher trusses and moved the I-Mag to portrait and brought it close to the show. We changed it to LED to match the rest of my product. It came out very powerful, and I think it looks great.
Summing up…
“It’s been amazing! I have gotten to see and do things I would never have imagined, and now it’s about time for a break and to do it all over again on the next album cycle.”
Twenty One Pilots “Emotional Roadshow” 2017 Tour
Crew
- Production, Lighting & Set Designer/Programmer: Daniel Slezinger
- Lighting Director & Co-Designer/Programmer: Tyler “Shap” Shapard
- Lighting/Video/Rigging Co: Concert Investor
- Concert Investor Account Rep: Justin Roddick
- Creative Director: Mark C. Eshleman
- Lighting Crew Chief: Todd Erickson
- Lighting Techs: Vreje Bakalian, Leith DuVall, Omar Collazo, Mark Chancellor, Bob Madison
- Video Director: Adam Peck
- Video Engineer/Crew Chief: Sean Green
- Video Techs: Matt Binford, Alex Gibson, Robbie Weaver
- Tour Manager: Andrew Weiss
- Production Manager: Daniel Gibson
- Stage Manager: Sam “Fish” Wilson
- Staging Cos: Accurate Staging/SGPS
- Special FX: Imagine Engineering
- FX Crew: Brian Retay, Mark Wunder
- Riggers: Mark Knowles, Dan Lowe
- Carpenters: Michael Benjamin, Mark Renfro
- Trucking: Stage Call
Gear
- 2 grandMA2 full consoles
- 1 grandMA2 Light
- 108 Robe Pointes
- 56 Robe BMFLs
- 12 Robe BMFL Blades
- 24 Robe LEDWash 1200s
- 28 Robe LEDWash 600s
- 10 Claypaky Sharpy Washes
- 8 Claypaky B-EYE K20s
- 83 Philips Showline SLNitro 510C
- 22 Elation 2-lites
- 6 Elation 4-lites
- 4 Philips Color Kinetics iCoves
- 12 Sigma Cryo Jets
- 6 Confetti cannons
- 1 Custom LED mic
- 4 DF50 hazers
- 2 MDG TheONE fogger/hazers
- 212 Winvision 9 panels
- 180 Winvison Air 9 panels (4’x2’)
- 18 Winvision Air 9 half panels (2’x2’)
- 2 d3 Technologies media servers
For more Twentyone Pilots Emotional Roadshow tour photos by Steve Jennings, go to:
{gallery}17/03/twenty-one-pilots{/gallery}
