Rob Thomas

To develop the retro vibe, we focused on simple geometric shapes, negative space, and leveraging bold retro lighting to help create a vintage-like piece of art that the Artist and Band could live in. 

Long rectangular and giant circular hero shapes kept coming to the forefront of timeless in our research and initial design studies…so we leaned in. During development, we retrofitted a giant beauty dish to a single-cell blinder fixture that Tony discovered, which resulted in a fast, punchy, and very retro-like fixture that gave moody glows and audience “WOW” bumps of light. These fun, unique fixtures became our anchor and implemented them into a wall of light…and our Retro Vibe started to take life. Since the tour was pretty versatile, the show needed to be equally versatile. Curtis and Tony began turning the concept into a practical, modular, and scalable set, configuring the wall of light and risers into a Horseshoe that wrapped around the stage, which made the performance space for Rob and the Band very inviting to the audience and gave anyone in the crowd a great view. Our wall of light turned into retro-like fingers of truss outlining the band risers, and we clad the negative space between the fingers of truss with a scenic soft good that would take light. 

The show didn’t have any content, so the team designed a unique color palette for lighting, which was inspired by mid-century cinema and simultaneously leaned into Rob’s Album Branding. The extended color palette made the album and show feel cohesive and original. As we were building out the show direction with Rob during one of our Super-Fun Playground “Jam Sessions”, we collectively decided that stripping the show down in the beginning would be the best path to grow and tell the story. We would begin the show only using our retro blinders. We also boldly decided to omit all colors and start the show monochrome, in white. We wouldn’t touch color until three songs into the set on “Diamonds” where we introduced this beautiful light blue hue. So fitting for the song, it felt magical when certain notes in the music inspired touches of color to be experienced for the first time. It was a perfect moment and evolution for the show. From there, we would begin to slowly add color and fixtures to the production, building layers upon layers. As a finishing touch for the All Night Days Tour, the team designed an “Impossible Circle” cut-out in the middle of our soft scenic, which allowed us to play with depth, color separation, shadows, and also acted as a fun unique entrance and exit for Rob.