Drew Hornback creates a textured production design for Scotty McCreery’s Cab in a Solo tour, which like the music it supports features a strong narrative element. At its heart is a three-paneled blow-through video wall displaying captivating content created by filmmaker Jeff Ray, the Austin, Texas creative responsible for many of McCreery’s videos, including Five More Minutes, This is It, In Between, Damn Strait, and It Matters to Her, as well as Cab in a Solo.
Adding visual impact to the video panorama are 18 CHAUVET Professional STRIKE Array 2 fixtures supplied by Blue Crew Productions of Nashville. Hornback positioned six of the high output warm-white blinders behind each of the blow-through walls. Turned on and off at different points in the show, and run at different levels of brightness, the high-output blinders change the visual fabric of the wall to conjure up new moods for different songs. At some points, the backlighting on the blow-through panels creates a memorable translucent effect, which gives the video displays a transcendent look.
Speaking of this aspect of his design, Hornbak noted: “The big thing I heard in the design process was that Scotty wanted a big change for the future. In the past few years, the show was very lighting heavy and he wanted to make a change to add in some cool video aspects. I knew with the venues that Scotty was playing we needed to make a solution that was easy to deploy but also easy to transport in one semi. We created custom video carts and knew that we wanted to use the STRIKE Array 2 behind the blow thru video wall. My idea was to keep with the column theme in the panels with the columns of light. I really wanted to rely on clean lines in the whole design and allow the video to be a key element but also have the clean lines with lighting placement.”
Programmed by Alec Takahashi and Benji Treuil, with Alexander Lehman running the boards on the road, the lighting served up a wide range of looks that moved in perfect harmony to the stories McCreery told in song.
Also contributing to these visuals, in addition to the STRIKE fixtures were 16 Maverick Force 2 Profiles, 12 Rogue R3X Washes and 12 Rogue R2X Washes. Drawing on the colour rendering prowess of these fixtures, the design team covered the stage in a rainbow of palettes from soft pastels to bold jewel tones. That makes sense. After all, some of the best stories are written in colour.
