Disney movies offer a virtually inexhaustible pool of musical masterpieces – from the great animated classics of the 1940s and 50s to the Pixar productions of the 21st century. The Disney in Concert series has been bringing this magic onto the large concert stage for many years. The production has been on tour once again in 2024, visiting arenas in Germany and Austria with the Hollywood Sound Orchestra. To keep the numerous soloists perfectly under the spotlight in front of the large LED wall at all times, gruppe20, the lighting technology service provider in charge, decided to rely on a zactrack SMART system.
“Stage production has continually developed in terms of technology over the years,” explains Klaus Mayer, managing director of gruppe20, which has overseen lighting and rigging for Disney in Concert since 2016. “The number of performers appearing on stage at the same time in musicals has grown as well. When eight or more artists are on stage, using followspots is no longer feasible. Also, with every less followspot operator operating at great height under the roof we are reducing the safety risk for crew and equipment at the event.”
For the live shows, gruppe20 equipped every artist with two zactrack SMART trackers – one at chest height at the front and one on the upper back – to ensure optimum signal detection. “In the case of ‘Disney in Concert’, the performers change costume for every song or movie, and speed is of the essence,” explained Christoph Miller, responsible for the planning, setting up and monitoring the zactrack SMART system during shows.
“Consequently, we attached the trackers in such a way that the performers could avoid touching and moving them unintentionally.” Apart from the musical performers, the conductor, Wilhelm Keitel, was also equipped with a tracker to allow the automated tracking of his repeated walks onto and off the stage, as is usual for conductors.
All in all, the team used eleven anchors to map the performance space: two anchors each on the left and right in the sidelight trusses, two anchors in the stage background, one anchor in the backlight truss as well as four anchors attached to the pyrotechnics dollies via fold-out magic arms.
Martin MAC Encore Performance moving heads were used as followspots above the FOH desk at Disney in Concert. “In the large venues, we needed extremely powerful moving lights for this location, which provide outstanding brightness even at a large distance, but can be pre-mounted to a PRT truss and used without any restrictions,” explained Klaus Mayer.
18 additional MAC Ultra Performance lights were suspended from the front truss for frontlight and effect lighting tasks. These were complemented by 12 MAC Aura XIP each, arranged in the side trusses in a 3×4 wash matrix.
For the lighting control, Lighting Operator, Florian Schmitt of Showtime Design relied on his grandMA3 (full-size and light consoles at FOH) in MA3 software mode: “The recipes give me much more flexibility in terms of programming. The same goes for the multi-touch user interface, which makes the work considerably more intuitive. Once you have got used to the MA3 workflow, you wouldn’t want to do without its benefits.”
Florian Schmitt also made good use of the advantages of the MA3 platform in the interaction with zactrack: “We incorporated the zactrack user interface like a video source as an NDI stream. This allowed us to keep track of the soloists at all times, even when the changes were happening – including costume and tracker changes.”
For Klaus Mayer of gruppe20, using zactrack at live concerts offers advantages not only for classic followspot applications, but also for automated effect lighting. “One beautiful effect is the automated, synchronous tracking by a large number of spots all focusing on the artist. That sort of thing was just not possible previously,” enthused Mayer about the zactrack system in final summary.
