Lighting Designer, Johnny Thinggaard was recently asked to create a production design for popular Danish pop/soul artist Lukas Graham’s The Pink Tour.
Thinggaard’s original idea was based on his love of side-angled photography and images that reveal details and spatial elements of the background. He also wanted something that was architecturally bold, but essentially simple in expression. For the first part of the tour, he used Robe T1 Profiles as front follow spots, running on a RoboSpot system.
When it came to the festival section of the ongoing tour, Thinggaard’s wanted to add some more powerful upstage light sources and he chose Robe FORTES for the job.
Five fixtures are used in total, four standard FORTES primarily for the band, with a FORTE FollowSpot in the centre comprising the main backlighting on Lukas Graham himself, all controlled via a RoboSpot BaseStation located backstage.
It was Thinggaard’s original intention to use BMFL WashBeams for the backlighting however rental company Vigsø Dryhire A/S had recently invested in FORTES, delivered by Robe’s Danish distributor Light Partner so they suggested these.
Colours and timing are both fundamental tools for Thinggaard in interpreting the music with lighting, and moments of magic will often happen during long colour fades. His Pink Tour colour palette contains multiple pastels with almost no primaries. It is strongly subtle, “If that makes sense?” he stated, adding that the FORTES have been impressive in creating this collection of more off-beat hues and shades.
The fully timecoded show is run from a grandMA3 console (running in 2 mode) with all the FORTE parameters for the four band spots controlled via the console, together with the colours and intensity for Graham’s central spot.
Assisting Thinggaard with the programming is August Thede and the touring lighting operator is Victoria Enoch. The lighting crew are Tobias Vohnsen, Rasmus Wiberg, Martin Jepsen, Niels Marcussen, and Mikkel Christensen. Overseeing all things technical on the road is production manager Bent Lauridsen, the tour manager is Anders Nørgaard Nielsen, and the pre-production and advance are being co-ordinated by Jens Qvistgaard.
