BREA, CA – Live Nation hired Visions Lighting to provide lighting, video, rigging, staging and special effects for all four of Korean pop band Big Bang’s US tour dates. Visions Lighting’s work extended into recreating a set piece as well within a 36-hour turnaround time, which was missing key parts on its journey from Korea. All Access Staging & Productions provided staging and lifts as well.
More details from Visions Lighting (http://www.visionslighting.com):
BREA, CA — The Korean wave continues to unfurl upon the world, and audiences are more enthusiastic and eager for the arrival of these artists than ever before. This past year Visions Lighting has been working closely with the K-pop industry and most recently with super group, Big Bang, as they ventured to the U.S. for the first time. Initially scheduled for one appearance in California and one in New Jersey, but with both shows selling-out within two hours, the “Big Bang Alive Galaxy Tour 2012” added two more U.S. concert dates to their schedule, two at Honda Center (CA) and two at the Prudential Center (NJ). Visions Lighting was there to support the artists and production at each of their U.S. tour dates.
Visions Lighting was hired on by Live Nation to provide lighting, video, rigging, staging and special effects for all four of Big Bang’s U.S. concert dates. Early on this was an exciting project. The five-member group/boy band’s overwhelming superstardom has made for sold-out shows in every country they’ve visited so far on their 14-country tour. Working with such a huge production makes Visions feel right at home.
Production Manager Todd Roberts said this was the largest stage ever put into the Honda Center. He describes the stage, designed at 108 ft wide by 66 ft deep by 7 ft high, with a 72 ft thrust going out to a ‘T’ into the audience. There were 7 elevators, 2 ribbon lifts and 2 conveyor belts built into it.
“That was just the first level,” explained Roberts. “The mezzanine level was made up of 3 separate truss decks!” To top that off, the band’s cube LED set rose another 24 ft above the mezzanine. “The total set height towered 42 ft from the floor of the stage, it was crazy,” he added.
With a production of this size, there were bound to be some challenges and Visions was ready to tackle them. During the first day of load-in producers realized that the set that had been shipped in from Korea was missing some major parts. With only 36 hours to show time they turned to Visions to create the massive set pieces.
“We rallied the troops and were able to produce the set pieces in perfect timing, and within the budget given to us, which wasn’t much since it was not budgeted of course,” said Roberts. “If you look at the pictures of the production, you would never know that they were made so quick and so inexpensively; they look great if I do say so myself!”
Visions Lighting provided all of the automated and conventional lighting, video and rigging to fulfill the band’s extensive rider. The lighting programming was executed with the entire show time-coded from start to finish.
“We supplied over 150 moving lights and 200 conventional, which is a smaller number of lights than you would expect for such a huge production, but every light had it’s purpose and was used to its fullest,” explained Roberts.
Visions also supplied over 390 LED tiles ranging from 6mm to 15mm to supplement the band’s 300 tiles to create an intense look. Roberts said, “With many different surfaces in different dimensions they had the ability to map all surfaces as one or break them into many different surfaces at different depths. It created amazing visual impact.”
Big Bang is now moved on to the rest of their sold-out world tour, but their first U.S. performances, with the help of Visions Lighting, went off with a bang.
