Toucan Productions has started to livestream weekly DJ sets from its facility in Oklahoma City using a festival-worthy setup that includes nearly 100% Elation lighting gear. Dubbed Secret Shop and hosted on Twitch TV, the livestream broadcasts feature multiple 45-minute DJ sets and run every Wednesday from 8:00 pm to midnight Central Daylight Time in the U.S.
Arvol Dingess and Parker Shore, both of Toucan, have been instrumental in getting the Secret Shop livestreams up and running, an idea that emerged from COVID-19 downtime. “Sometime in May, Arvol, our video lead at Toucan, hit me up with the idea to do a streaming show from the Toucan shop and I jumped on it,” said Shore, an Oklahoma City native who has been a lighting specialist at Toucan for the past five years. “We did some cocktail napkin sketches of the rig, built it and then pitched it to my network of DJs. Since no one has gigs at the moment, they’ve been more than happy to do it.”
With few projects on the board and touring put on hold (Shore was supposed to be on the road as L2/Laser Programmer for Louis the Child), the idea came together fairly quickly with the first Secret Shop DJ sets airing on May 27th. Not only have the sets provided much needed musical relief during the Covid pandemic, they have allowed Toucan personnel to hone a new skill, one that will almost certainly be essential in the near future.
“As there won’t be concerts for a while, we’re taking the time to keep our skill set sharp and develop some new ones,” Shore said. “We’re a concert company, not a streaming company, but we’re continuing to learn and this is a good skill set to have.” Shore says the Secret Shop sessions have also let them stay hands on with the gear while trying out some new ideas. “For example, the Smarty Max is new to the shop so it’s been good to get to know that fixture better and try it out in this setup. It’s so bright and is one of my favorite fixtures right now. I’d love to build this rig for a live event someday and have some ideas on how I could use that.”
Toucan’s Secret Shop setup is impressive and would be a fitting design for any EDM rave. Twenty-four Elation Rayzor Q7 LED moving heads line the upstage truss as top border across the video wall while 8 Smarty Max hybrid moving heads populate a midstage truss (an earlier incarnation of the setup used 8 Artiste DaVinci LED moving heads on the midstage.) Four floor-based DaVinci’s provide silhouette light while Platinum Beam Extreme moving heads are spread throughout the rig.
Two other Oklahoma City Production companies have lent their support to the project, CNS Productions supplying cameras, cabling and switching; and LaserWolf FX providing laser projectors along with pixel beam bars for a DJ-surround laser cage. Lighting Designer, Lighting Operator, Parker Shore; Video Designer, Arvol Dingess and Director of Photography, Andree Brown made up the crew.