Your birthday is coming, and it’s a big one. You need a serious antidote to the pain of turning 40. So, what do you do? If you’re Kid Rock, you throw yourself a concert.
Your birthday is coming, and it’s a big one. You need a serious antidote to the pain of turning 40. So, what do you do? If you’re Kid Rock, you throw yourself a concert.
Your birthday is coming, and it’s a big one. You need a serious antidote to the pain of turning 40. So, what do you do? If you’re Kid Rock, you throw yourself a concert. Then, of course, you take it on the road. On January 15, 2011, Ford Field in Detroit, Michigan, became the setting for a 3-hour concert extravaganza, where Kid Rock set about sharing his birthday milestone with 60,000 of his hometown friends. Then, to prove that turning 40 hadn’t slowed him down, he retooled the concert, turned it around in 7 days and launched the “Born Free” Tour from the Dow Event Center in Saginaw, Michigan.
A long-term relationship with Kid Rock’s Production Designer Nook Schoenfeld brought us into the project. Tasked with creating two visually different shows, Schoenfeld started with the birthday piece, envisioning two 50’ x 24’ video walls which would flank both sides of the stage. Montages of Rock’s life and salutes from stars would run on these, and lasers, pyro, and dancer locations would animate the concert. Then, working off a request from Kid Rock to create a set for the tour that matched his 1964 Pontiac Bonneville (which sports western-style leather seats and a nine-foot-wide set of longhorn steer horns,) he designed multi-tiered scenery that resembled a country western bar, with a 28-foot-wide video wall above the set used to revisit and expand on the video run for the birthday concert. Having created the designs for sets and lights, he then brought in Howard Ungerleider to design the laser show, and Lightswitch to produce the media design.
As a multi-faceted company versed in the language of design, we can bring our artistic sensibility to projects other than lighting. The Kid Rock birthday concert and ensuing “Born Free” tour are examples of our ability to operate independently, creating a striking media design in collaboration with other production and special effects designers.
