Lighting and visual design for the live industry is a boiling brew of creativity and technology, but the final concoction also involves a heavy dose of listening and collaboration. After all, a designer can rarely just run roughshod in their own direction without any input from the artist who will perform in front of the photon canvas they cook up.
And since every act is different with different demands and visions, success for lighting and visual teams also relies on nimbleness and flexibility.
Consider the acts design collective Lightswitch has worked for in the post-pandemic live explosion: screen score extraordinaire Hans Zimmer, stadium-filling Latin megastar Karol G, genre-ignoring alt favorite Beck, whimsical monologuing comedian Eddie Izzard, even an eSports competition at Brooklyn’s Barclays Center for first-person-shooter Overwatch.
What works for Zimmer while he leads an orchestra through the soaring theme of the “Pirates of the Caribbean” franchise isn’t exactly what Izzard is looking for while she tells her “Cake or Death” story.
But … it’s kind of the same, says principal and managing director John Featherstone of Lightswitch, which has been around 31 years. “Fundamentally for us, it’s about two parts,” he says. “The first part is storytelling. Eddie’s telling a story that is every bit as important to Eddie as Karol’s stories are to Karol as Beck’s are to Beck as Hans’ are to Hans so it’s understanding what that artist wants to say.”
And the key at Lightswitch is what the team calls “pragmatic design,” which informs the conversations the team has with clients.
“Let’s say you’re on a plane and there’s two people behind you talking about your show,” Featherstone hypothesized. “What do you want them to be saying? You’re reading social media. What are the things that you want people to be saying about your show that are important? Then we scoop up all that gold and we rinse it through what we call pragmatic design which is making sure that we’re staying authentic to three big factors.”
Those factors are symbolized in the company’s interlocking circles logo.
“This is symbolic of the creative, the financial and the logistics,” Featherstone says. “What we think our job is as a designer is to take our clients’ story, their mission, their reason for doing it and make the overlap of those three elements as big as possible. We want to maximize the creativity, maximize the financial return and maximize the logistics.”
Chris Medvitz, also a principal and managing director, says that balance is what differentiates a designer from an artist.
“If all we’re going to do is worry about the art part then I would argue we’re artists and not designers and the artist is what the person or the band on stage is, right?” he says. “The job of a designer is you have to be responsible for those other things, you have to be responsible for the fact that this has to exist in the real world, it has to be tourable, it has to fit into venues. You can have the most crazy show, but at the end of the tour the artist says ‘Well. Why didn’t I make any money?’”
And those practical concerns must inform the artistic ones, which means working holistically not just with the artists but with tour managers and other backstage staff.
“I was very flattered that after we did the Hans show in Oakland, one of the stage hands I’ve known for a long time came up to me and said this was a 15 truck show but it felt like 10. It’s about making sure that you’re keeping all of that in balance and working within those bumpers,” Medvitz says.
On the technical side, the advent and advance of LEDs has been a watershed, allowing for more flexibility and creativity while also producing less waste, since LEDs have to be replaced far less often than their incandescent forebears. But, Tyler Elich, the principal and managing director who worked on, among other projects, Izzard’s Tours and the Barclay’s Overwatch event, said the next big change may come from the biggest technological buzzword of the moment: AI.
“There’s already a box out that you plug in your music and it kind of creates a light show and for a small band, it’s not too bad,” he says. “I don’t think in the next 10 years, the three of us are going to be replaced by AI but we’re starting to use all these AI tools.”
The fact is, Elich says, artists are still collaborative beings and like all people, need human feedback.
“It’s easy to go, ‘Oh my God it’s gonna be the end of the world as we know it,’ when really it’s a tool that we can choose to be afraid of and it’s gonna get adopted badly or we can grasp it and focus it and use it to liberate creativity rather than replace creativity,” he says. “I think the human connection is what it’s ultimately all about. An artist does not want to hire an AI, they don’t want to have a box that’s front of house. They want to have a human that they can talk to after the show and that human connection is really at the core of what we do.”
And that human connection can show up in the unlikeliest of places: like a video game competition at a Brooklyn arena.
“I’ve done thousands of shows, concerts, big events, but seeing that many people so excited, coming together because of their shared passion that they have done alone and now they’re around 20,000 of their friends who are all the same nerd about the same thing and they can nerd out and they can scream and they can freak out,” Elich says. “I’ve never felt a more powerful event than that.”
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