On November 18th, 2017, Gareth Emery's first Laserface performance in New York become a huge hit. Not only did the show sell out, but fans wanted more. It was decided that Laserface would return for an Encore in San Francisco, at the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium.
However, Laserface was not your typical performance. It's a show designed with the idea of combining lasers and music creating a perfect marriage. After deciding on the location, Nice Lasers owner Anthony Garcia, who eventually became the tour manager, had the task of finding the resources needed to create a show Laserface would be.
Because Laserface is a show on such a high caliber, Garcia wanted to get the best in the business to make the show a complete success. Though to provide the amount of lasers needed without draining a companies resources, it would mean that multiple companies would need to be involved.
Providing plenty of lasers, and production management is the owner of Dynamic FX, Shane Martz. Adam LaBay provided 38 Kvant lasers, including 12 Kvant 20W Specturm Lasers, 8 ClubMax 6000s, and 18 ClubMax 3400s.
Pangolin's very own BEYOND 4.0 Beta and FB4 control, was the laser control software and hardware of choice, as well as our PASS (Professional Audience Safety System) to allow for audience scanning in the United States. Finally, Garcia contacted Guinness World Record holder ER Productions to help provide laser beam bars, and network distribution. It was specified from Lawrence Wright at ER Productions, that Garcia wanted 16 of ER's audience scanning lasers, 16 ER Storm lasers, and 64 ER Blade lasers.
With the desire to make the crowd feel involved, Anthony Garcia surrounded the room with lasers, as well as running truss the length of house left and right. To create high power aerial effects, Future Weapons provided Kvant's new Spectrum 20W with FB4 containing Pangolin's ultra-fast Saturn 5 Scanners, capable of projecting insanely complex and detailed content built inside of each spectrum.
Interestingly, Kvant was the first in the United States to become certified for audience scanning, and with the integration of Pangolin's PASS hardware inside of the ClubMax lineup, it allowed for a legal setup with perfect control for audience scanning laser shows.
Due to the enormous 122 lasers used for the show, processing power had to distributed among three different computers with time-code. Pangolin's BEYOND 4.0 Beta was the software of choice, "as we needed to take advantage of some of the great new features" - Shane Martz.
Using a system called TC Supply in cohorts with Pioneer DJ, the software displays the tracks(s) currently being played with the information into the software allowing an operator to choose what track should be playing within the mix. Then it splits the time-code for a chosen track among the computers running BEYOND. This allowed each computer to have a specific area of lasers that were assigned to it, creating distributed processing from the large amount of cues and effects.
With not only needing to gather the large amount of lasers that were used for Laserface, it was realized there would need to be a more convenient way to network the lasers. Pangolin's FB4 is a media server for your laser show, giving you complete control of all projector and control parameters. Since FB4 has high speed network capability over CAT-5, everything was extremely fast, and easy to operate.
"It was a pleasure to see this variety of different companies from across the laser industry connect to bring this immense laser display to life." - Justin Perry, Chief Operating Officer at Pangolin Laser Systems and Kvant Lasers.
(Information provided via PLSN)
Photography Credits:
- Jesse Perez (Uneak Photography)
- Drew Ressler
Crew
- Lead Designer/Production Manager: Anthony Garcia
- Laser Design Co: Nice Lasers
- Lighting Designer: Allan Susanto
- Assistant PM/Laser Crew Chief: Shane Martz
- Laser Safety Officer: Adam LaBay
- Laser Technical Director: Lawrence Wright
- Laser Techs: Cameron Moreno, Garrett Gosting, Matson McCrabb, Michael Ciccone
- Laser Companies: Future Weapons, Dynamic FX, ER Productions
- Laser Control: Pangolin Beyond
- Timecode Synch: TC Supply, LLC
- Video/LED: Show Imaging Inc.
- Special Effects Co: Owl Vision, LLC
- Lighting Co: Felix Lighting
- Backline: AOP Entertainment
- Visual Content: VJCLA
Laser Gear
- 12 Kvant Spectrum 20W lasers
- 8 Kvant ClubMAX 6000 Audience Scanning Lasers
- 18 Kvant ClubMAX 4000 Audience Scanning Lasers
- 8 ER Productions Storm 15W Lasers
- 4 Dynamic FX “Longboi” 15W Lasers
- 64 ER Productions Laser Blades