Future Music Festival with Lightning Lighting (13/3/11)

Festival-going is a national sport in Australia. I’m sure that if we divided up the amount of festivals per capita, we may have the highest rate of festivals in the world and Paper-Deer certainly approves.

When Paper-Deer approached tour-de-force festival lighting company Lightning Lighting about an industry interview with the minds behind buzzing up out our favourite fests, they came back with one better: “Want to watch us in action?” So that’s how I got a Triple A crew pass to Future Music Festival.

LL’s Senior Lighting Designer Andy Mutton (pictured) meets me at the gates, greeting me with my pass after what seems like an eternity of being stared-down by the guards (who probably thought I was waiting for the opportune moment to jump the fence). In the brief walk from the station to the Silent Disco, I shoot out rapid fire questions at Andy: Coolest light show you’ve done? When did you start preparing for Future Music this year? How many trucks did it take to move all the gear used in today’s event? Weaving us in and out of the crowds, Andy replies: “God’s Kitchen 2010 was pretty cool but I always think the last one I did was the best. 2 months before hand…” and then starts thinking hard, “13 semis just for lighting, about 6 for sound, maybe… 20 for the stages? 20 for the scaffolding? I’m not sure. Maybe email me and I’ll try to ask the organisers, but it’s a lot.”

The sun hasn’t even set yet but there are drunk punters by the truckload and Andy and I cut the queue into the Silent Disco where he chuckles quietly. “There are two different DJs, two different channels,” he points at the podium. “It’s funny because if one of them drops a beat in you’ll see every second person in the room put their hands up in the air.”

The sight of people nosily dancing to  silent music is only entertaining for so long, so we whisk past the Roller Disco (“No one skating yet,” Andy notes) to The Likes of You tent where we slip past yet more suspicious guards with our hot pink passes. “Have a look at this,” Andy indicates at a team of serious looking men doing complicated things to some sort of structural frame backstage. According to the lighting designer, the team are dismantling Leftfield‘s stage design, and reworking it into what will become Plastikman‘s stage. While Sven Vath was wowing the crowd in the main tent, the punters didn’t know what was going on backstage. “It’s awesome that we can give the audience two different stage designs, not just the headlining band’s.” Andy also smiles at the decor he put together: silver curtains, while lanterns glowing with purple lights and disco balls. “We try not to have rock stages because these are not rock bands. Plus the silver curtains are just cool.”

Next up is the main stage, Andy announces. On the way we get stopped by an extremely intoxicated man of the British variety who spots our crew wrist bands and thinks we are his path to salvation, and babbles to us. “Hey man, do you know where the bars are? Like more bars? The queue for this bar is too fucking long. Do you know where we can get alcohol faster?”

I quiz the Lightning Lighting main man again mid-transit. Most challenging thing that can happen while doing lighting for a festival? “When we lose power. Does happen. Pretty much internal problems and sometimes if it’s raining but the majority of the lights and sound gear are under cover anyway. We also have plastic coverings, so if it rains we cover up the gear until it stops.”  I then point at the giant blue shipping containers stacked on top of each other on either side of the stage and ask, “Is that what the gear is moved around in?” Apparently not. “They’re actually empty. We just hire them out to block out the sound, otherwise the PA noise travels between stages. In some cities we hire many more and they circle the back of the stages because the festivals take place in residential areas.”

The backstage area of the Future Music Festival Stage - AKA the ominous sounding Stage 1 - looked like a well-run ship (and probably the same amount of water considering the rain). Battered road cases being wheeled about, heavy equipment lugged by some impressively strong men and everyone fiddling about purposefully to set up for Dizzee Rascal‘s set. Andy gets excited when he points at a very nondescript pile of equipment folded over and covered with tarp behind Dizzee’s stage lighting. “See this? This is for The Chemical Brothers.” It’s a giant screen that folds down concertina style, and is “see-through” because of the many holes in its design. The actual screen has lights in it, and will flash footage of a robot for the dance duo. And because the screen is see-through, they will also shoot out lights out the back that will seem to come out of the screen (with all the lights mapped to the robots movements). If that isn’t neat, I don’t know what is.

With such an elaborate set-up, I wonder if any of the bands ever get their wildest design dreams denied. Andy thinks for a moment before answering slowly, “Future is about giving as many headliners what they want. The Chemical Brothers stage was designed by their team, and we try to design the other bands’ stages around the headlining band’s ideas. The Presets are using lots of The Chemical Brothers designs in their own stage, but there are some things like the screen that only The Chemical Brothers are allowed to use.”

As a lighting designer who has been freelancing for Future for 12 years, one has to ask how he ended up as one of the world’s top lighting geniuses. Andy had humble beginnings, doing lighting at school plays before moving on to being a stage hand for Stevie Wonder. Along the way he was a stage hand and worked as a lighting rigger. His advice for kids wanting to play with bright lights and colours? “Hassle lighting companies, ask to be a factory hand. You can do courses but you really need to immerse yourself in it and be around it, and people above you will be willing to teach you if you start from the bottom. Learning all that prepping takes a couple of years and eventually they’ll take you out on a job. But in the mean time you can get your forklift licence and your dogman and riggers ticket.”

The next stage that Andy gives me a tour of is his pride and joy at this year’s festival: The Dusk Till Doorn Stage, where Sander Van Doorn is spinning tunes for the crowd. It may be one of the smaller stages at the festival, but was fully designed by Andy so the results are spectacular; not having to design around a headlining act’s stage, he pretty much went all out.  “I can design until someone complains – they do need some space to get on and off,” he grins, pointing out the very little room left on the relatively small stage for the DJs to move around. Two 8m diametre circle trusses arc gloriously across the stage (where they would normally sit horizontal as a piece of structure, these have been flipped on an angle to act as an aesthetic feature as well) adorned with cobra panels that have been impressively mapped out so the visuals seamlessly jump between the separate screens, and behind this all a screen covering the entire back wall of the stage.

But it’s at the Mazda 2 Flamingo Stage that we get to see Andy in action – doing the lighting for the super-rad Steve Angello. There’s a full team assembled for this headliner, with a team of about six people fiddling about with panels and computers at the front of house tent for this set, trying not to get distracted by the drunk guy dancing on the roof in his underpants (not joking) and people stealing the giant playing card walls of the makeshift Vegas-themed shack. “I found it hard to get started with the set, but was good because you should always ‘save’ the best for last,” Andy admits later in the artist compound. His light show is absolutely dazzling, with colours and light textures that weirdly seem to match Angello’s beats perfectly. “I don’t operate like most people. I have my own style, which is sometimes called the ‘flash & release’. I build a bunch of lighting cues. I have colour, movement, intensity, prism movements that rotate. My style is playing all these different cues then smashing them all together using gravity to fill it all in.” He cites Metallica’s lighting person as an inspiration for passing on his technique of timing the lighting effects to the offbeats of Lar Ulrich’s unique drumming style.

Andy’s fantastical, over-the-top lighting work really proves why festivals aren’t just about the music, but the entire experience including the visuals. Steve Angello’s set was everything you could want in a headlining festival performance. A world-class DJ. Great sound. Confetti. Gas machines (similar to smoke machines rather than any kind of terrorist machination). And of course, eye-poppingly awesome lights.

LINKS:

• Lightning Lighting official website
• Andy Mutton on Twitter
• Andy Mutton on LinkedIn
• Future Entertainment

CREDITS:

Many thanks to Andy Mutton and Shanaaz Peake at Lightning Lighting, and to Jason Ayoubi and Mark James of Future Entertainment. Photos taken by Paige X. Cho and her pathetic point-and-shoot, so apologies for the blurriness!