EMELI SANDE: REAL LIFE TOUR

Colourful, theatrical deisgns created by Bluman Associates Kyle Reseigh are controllable live from the lighting desk.  ‘Real Life’ toured theatre venues around Europe and the UK. Notch Designer, Kyle Reseigh shares his design process:

“The first iteration of the Real Life tour was Emeli Sande’s showcase at the Sadlers Wells. Fruit Pie Music approached us with the brief, which was simply ‘orange’. After the success of the showcase, we were asked to create looks for the tour. Each song had its own story and look, for the tour we would be expanding and diversifying our orange theme. We worked closely with Emeli and the band to develop looks which fit the overall theme of ‘realness’, and enabled a feeling of intimacy between Emeli and the audience.”

“The visual design needed to have exposable parameters that could be affected live on the night by the Lighting Designer Chris Richardson. Creating a show design which seamlessly unifies lighting and video design was an essential element of the brief.”

“The fluidity of Notch allowed me to jump in and out of scenes quickly. I could experiment with looks and work on multiple looks at once. I felt like I was constantly making progress with my designs.”

“The acoustic Piano Section was my favourite to work on. The brief was ‘Smokey Jazz Bar’, which is just full of great imagery and colours. I imagined candles, bokeh, and dense purple fog.”

“To create smoke, I used Volumetric Lighting paired with a gradient as the projection image. I could get the same sort of colour effect you get from Temperatures and Densities to achieve that top downlight effect. I also used one of my favourite nodes, Time Stretch, on the particles, which was good at creating big swells for climaxes in songs and was very simple to control. I used Time Stretch on most of the scenes.”

“The brief for ‘Hurts’ was ‘Spanish Gypsy Soul’, at first, I struggled to think of the imagery for this track. It had to be incredibly fast-paced, high contrast and punchy to match the emotion in the song. I envisioned a never-ending void, which I created using a Turbulent Fluid-Particle system.”

“I wanted the beat of the drums to drive particle emission. Using a few modifiers to enable a beat pulse, I created a control system that the LD could flick on for the chorus. This particle system worked really well with the fluid effect I had invested in earlier, creating a layered crashing wave effect in the centre of this void.”

“An amazing benefit of using Notch was the support I could offer remotely while the show was on the road. There were a few occasions where the crew requested edits while the show was out on the road. I could have edits turned around and on the server in another country within an hour, this was due to the size I was able to compress Notch blocks to, and the speed I could render looks. This fast process eliminated any potential for stressful situations on-site.”

“I think we were able to achieve the looks the band had asked for. It was a fantastic experience creating this suite of animated looks for the tour. The video design blends perfectly with the lighting design and gives Chris a greater deal of control whilst out on the road with the show.”