PlayStation: The Concert tour is proving a great opportunity for Netherlands-based visual design studio The Art of Light. Under the creative direction of André Beekmans, the team energised its interdisciplinary skills and vast experience of lighting large concerts, events, and spectaculars to enhance this new and exciting stage presentation.
PlayStation: The Concert is a thrilling four-segment fusion of live music, the intrigue and excitement of online gaming and the highly visual environments that immerse and weave all these dynamic elements together.
Each ‘chapter’ is inspired by one of four iconic PlayStation titles – The Last of Us, God of War, Ghost of Tsushima, and Horizon, and peppered with themes from Bloodborne, Astro Bot, Journey, Uncharted, and Helldivers 2, delivering a dramatic, action-packed performance to an enthusiastic fanbase.
Beekmans was delighted to be part of a wider creative collaboration and take an out-of-the-box approach to the project, which resulted in producing a series of multi-layered and highly detailed illuminative treatments.
When The Art of Light was contacted by GEA Live, an initial visual draft of the stage environment was in play, created by London-based immersive and multimedia design studio, NorthHouse. Technical Director, Stefan Hoohenkerk of Creative Control joined the team shortly after.
NorthHouse also produced the visual mood boards and video content, and for all these aspects, including an 18-piece band to flourish in a live context, they needed a large clean elegant stage, which was a key starting point for Beekmans’ lighting.
Challenges for lighting were not so much in the specification and hardware placement, they lay more in the abstract realms of imagining and mapping out effects and a performance space hosting highly specific and individual gaming characters – and their worlds – that impressed an incredibly focused fanbase who notice every detail.
Lighting was vital in the translation of these hyperreal gaming worlds into a live 3D space and in creating an authenticity that exhilarated and fascinated guests. Beekmans embraced the rich, colourful, and exhaustive precision of these gaming universes each with its own very unique style of lighting.
“The whole Art of Light team needed to properly understand how lighting functioned in relation to the games, in addition to lighting the stage and musicians appropriately for a concert set up,” he explained. “Our brief was to complement the video content and music perfectly so fans would become immersed – just as if they were playing.”
This included assigning lighting effects as visual leitmotifs to different characters appearing onscreen as well as all the usual practical tasks of good stagecraft. Other design considerations were ensuring the whole production was practical, tourable and packaged to work on the road. With a large upstage LED screen in place, the creative team wanted an ‘opera gauze’ projection effect at the front to add another dimension, and Beekmans and Hoohenkerk proposed a series of five motorised roll-drops downstage. Being able to vary the gauze layers added to the general dynamics of the bigger picture and enabled specific lighting effects to feature and amplify for accents and impact.
The Art of Light team took their knowledge plus the adrenaline rush of creating memorable visual moments working on massive EDM shows, theatrical productions, festivals and other live performance show scenarios which can only be augmented with dramatic lighting.
Beekmans and The Art of Light’s collaborators included Lighting Programmer and Operator, Tom Pietermans; Lighting Programmer, Rik Verschuren; Niels Kieboom who managed and coordinated all the WYSIWYG and Syncronorm Depence visualisation files and Project Manager, Romy van Schijndel.
As lighting for each section of the show was developed, visualisation render files were sent to the PlayStation team to review and then discussed and noted at the weekly online meetings that took place throughout the design process period, so all arrived organised and ready to roll at production rehearsals.
The tour kicked off at the in Dublin and then toured Europe. It will continue later in the year.
Words: Louise Stickland
Photo: Zdenko Hanout
