Here at Fascination! we like to clue our readers in to interesting articles about Cirque du Soleil and its shows that appear in various printed, video, and online media. Recently we found one such article discussing the stage technology of Michael Jackson ONE. Unfortunately it requires the potential reader to subscribe to the online edition (though that is free) in order to view the archived article. And it’s just too much audio-visual technobabble for us to recommend going to the trouble. Instead, we can take the most interesting bits and quote them here!
The article appeared in the November, 2013 edition of Lighting and Sound America magazine. You can find the entire original article, including an exhaustive breakdown of all of the equipment involved in the show by subscribing (and accessing the electronic copies of back issues) at www.lightingandsoundamerica.com .
The article, entitled, “Thriller – Cirque du Soleil pays tribute to the King of Pop in Michael Jackson ONE” by Richard Cadena goes into great detail about the audio, stage mechanics, lighting and projections involved in Cirque’s latest resident show. We found some interesting quotes and facts among the highly detailed listing of equipment within. To whit: (the remainder of this article are direct quotes from that article)
Kevin Antunes, Musical Director: “You take this sound system, combined with the immersion of an IMAX like surround-sound theater, then you take the storyline that Jamie King put together, all the creative minds of Cirque, and Michael Jackson’s music to create a truly unbelievable show.”
Sound Designer Jonathan Deans: “Come naked, we’ll clothe you in sound. It’s very immersive. I want you to wear the sound.”
The audio in Michael Jackson ONE doesn’t overpower the rest of the production, but it blends well. It’s not exceedingly loud, and there are no gratuitous 3-D effects, just great quality sound that you would expect from a live concert. And there’s a very good reason for that.
“Every time I do a Cirque show,” Deans says, “in the sound world, they have to be different and unique. This one is very much like attending a concert by Michael Jackson, I really want you to feel as if you’re at a great concert. We’re not standing there screaming and lighting lighters but a very elegant concert.”
“It’s surround sound,” Deans says, “but we make our own format, like in LOVE. In fact, during one of the sessions of LOVE, someone asked, “What format is it?” I said, “I don’t know because I don’t work in formats; I work with what’s needed for the production.” The format is not a format because every single moment, and certainly every single song, has a different way of coming at you. It’s not something that is fixed because if it is fixed, that’s a movie. Movies have formats because they need to go from one movie house to another. It has to be something very fixed so that you can plug in and off you go. We’re not interested in that. The only way you can hear Michael Jackson ONE is by coming here. There’s nowhere else you can hear it, any of the music, in the same way.”
One major consideration [about video] was the choice of presentation format. “More and more in rock shows today, we use LED screens,” Jimmy Lakatos, Video Designer says. “And they are so powerful that they light the entire stage.” It was a challenge, he adds, to strike a balance between the light on the stage and the brightness of the video. “Normally, Jamie King is used to working with the power of video walls, but, in this case, we needed to rethink how we needed to show the images with less power.”
The designers had one factor in their favor, however, and that was time. They used it to set up gear on the stage, measure light levels, and evaluate the effectiveness of video projection as opposed to an LED video wall. “It was a lot of trial and error,” Lakatos says, “and that time was very valuable. It was really important to work with the light meter. We’re at around 30FC [foot-candles] in this show. Normally, we work at around 50 or 60. We needed very, very high contrast.”
Toward the end of pre-production, King decided to add another video element to the show, and Dago González came on board to incorporate more video of Jackson in addition to the manufactured content.
“Jamie King is a director of shows in rock environments,” Lakatos says, “especially arenas, but he wanted more of a theatrical show. So that was our lead for at least a year. But when we started to present it, it was felt that we needed more of Michael’s presence. It really made a difference being able to see Michael Jackson dancing at the same time as the dancer on stage.”
Lakatos says Fly Studio owner Jean-Francois Talbot was very involved in creating video content for the project and spent time with them in Las Vegas. “It made a big difference. They work a lot with Softimage, Blue Newt, and After Effects, and they have a lot of good animators. Near the end, for about three weeks, we had about 20 people working full-time on the show creating new edits and new animations. Normally, we have no more than five or six.”
David Finn, who led the lighting design team, said, “Even though Jamie King is a pop director, I knew that the lighting had to have a real sense of theatricality to it, that I had to create atmospheres that support the storyline. I also knew that I had to have those pop elements in the [lighting design] plot, I knew that he would want to turn to them at some point and say, “Let’s just blow this number out, have a good time, and make a pop number inside of this little story that we built.””
The integration of lighting with the video was key to the design and programming process, and it was pulled off with aplomb. According to Finn, by the time lighting got to the theater for pre-production, the video crew already had four or five numbers “roughed in.” They already had ideas for about 10 numbers; another 10 were yet to be designed.
“For the four or five numbers that video had roughed in,” Finn says, “I took my cues from them and I based my work around what they were doing. It really came down to color, rhythm, and speed of movement. They would put an image up, and I would start working from that image. But then I would take a turn, and they would follow me. It really was a 50-50 give-and-take. They would say, “We really love what you’re doing with that” and I would say the same thing. It was a true collaboration in that sense.”
One of the more notable lighting technologies involves the custom LED elements, especially in the costumes. It took nearly 6 months of tedious work to program the LEDs in the costumes and the set. “When we mention that we have over 7,000 LEDs, we feel like we’ve earned the right to brag a bit,” Joshua Hind, project manager says. “Because of the complexity of the pieces, we ended up programming most of those 7,000 LEDs individually.”
Finn says that there are more than 13,500 cues in the show, and programming the LEDs in the costumes and the set was incredibly time-consuming. “The “Billy Jean” number alone probably took two months to program,” Finn says. “We had to start out by mapping all the LEDs, and some of the costumes had 300 or 400 LEDs in them. And then if I said, “I want the thing to go blue from head to toe,” we would have to make sure we had the mapping in the right order and know whether the arms were up or down, if a leg was out or in … it was crazy!”
The success of the show guarantees that Jackson’s music and legacy will survive, and the sound, imagery and emotions of his live shows will remain intact. For the designers, engineers, technicians, and performers, it was the kind of project that might only come once in a lifetime, but to the audience, it’s a way of transcending time.
“I think people really enjoy seeing Michael,” Lakatos says, “which is why I think the show works well. At the end of the day, people really feel the presence of Michael.”
“He’s not alive,” Deans says, “but his presence is definitely here. You feel him. And I feel that if Michael was with us, he would be sitting here going, ‘Yeah!’”
