Lighting
Designer Tom Kenny produced another spectacular large-scale work to illuminate
the 2015 mtvU Woodie Awards staged at the vast Austin American Statesman site
on the south bank of the Colorado River during the SXSW Music Festival. The
popular event, organized by MTV’s 24-hour college network, capitalized on the
buzz, excitement and sizzling array of cool, new, emerging and cutting-edge
music that grips the city of Austin, Texas, for the week.
Tom works on
many high-profile Awards show designs and continues to create new and original
lighting schemes. For this year’s Woodies, he incorporated over 200 Robe moving
lights – Pointes, LEDWash 1200s and LEDWash 600s – into the rig, for which his
starting point was a stunning stage-set sculpture crafted from tens of
thousands of wood planks, imagineered by Julio Himede.
The beautiful
jagged wood structure clad the two stages which were set up side-by-side to
facilitate a festival ‘flip-flop’ style presentation that ensured eight hours
of continuous music from 5 p.m.
Hosted by
Jack Antonoff (frontman of The Bleachers) the super-hot line-up featured ground-breaking
artists like Big Sean, James Bay, Tove Lo, Years & Years, Marina & The
Diamonds, Fall Out Boy, Ellar Contraine, Hoodie Allen, and many more. It was also
recorded for a one-hour special, broadcast across the MTV network (of which
mtvU also includes 750 college and university campuses throughout the U.S.).
Tom has
worked with Julio many times before and having such an eye-catching and vast
stage set “made the job of lighting it simultaneously straightforward yet
complex and more challenging,” explained the Miami-based lighting and visuals
specialist.
In keeping
with the whole vibe and energy of the Woodies and the wider one of SXSW, his
goal was to make it “young, vibrant, colorful and positive but definitely with
a bit of an edge.” He adds that The Woodies has a very specific audience, with
which the event’s creative team needed to be in tune.
The wooden
sets on both stages were similar but not identical, and were “great fun” to
light revealed Tom, a task for which he used 96 x Robe LEDWash 600s and 69 x
Robe LEDWash 1200s.
These were
rigged along the base of the sets and used to shoot light up through the
criss-crossing web of wood, with some fixtures located on custom platforms built
within the set structure itself.
Tom needed a
small, lightweight and powerful wash light with a nice even beam spread to fit
neatly within the set framework and blast light across the vast expanses of wood.
More LEDWash
1200s located on a series of trussing towers were used as workhorse washes to highlight
the site and the stages. It rained heavily during parts of the show, which
really enhanced the LEDWash beams. Along with the insatiable spirit of the
crowd, these fixtures could not be dampened!
The 36 x Pointes
were rigged on the front trusses above along with the decks of the two stages
and used for key lighting.
All the
lighting – which included other moving lights, strobes and a selection of
generics – was programmed onto the grandMA2 console operated for the show by
Matt Piercy under Tom’s direction, with another grandMA2 run by Matt Webb triggering
the media server and all the playback video cues.
The 2015 mtvU
Woodies was another massive success, attracting 2.2 million viewers on MTV,
generating 22 million Facebook impressions as the social team engineered an
official takeover of the ‘Music on Facebook’ page which helped the event trend
worldwide on Twitter during the show. There were 6 million Woodies story views
on Snapchat … and 24,000 RSVPs from fans attending the show.
A major
highlight – apart from the amazing production – was Fall Out Boy becoming the
first ever inductee into the illustrious ‘Hall of Wood’!
