INDUSTRY ICONS
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This might be a spoiler, but at the end of the show, the DeLorean flies over the audience, which is an impressive feat of engineering, but also creativity – in the sense that all the departments have to come together to pull it off. That’s what I love about using magic in shows. It’s not just a one-person job – you have to rely on lighting, sound and set designers – making it a deeply collaborative process. I also worked on Secret Cinema, where, again, I had to merge my knowledge of illusions and passion for immersive. We did Stranger Things , and one of the tasks was to make a can of coke levitate – which had been featured in the show. We also did Peaky Blinders , which was a dance show, and because of that I really wanted to make sure it wasn’t a show of magic tricks, instead featuring ‘visual enhancements’. An example of this is making people suddenly appear, or creating a scene where smoke is being expelled – but by no obvious means. Over the last two years, I’ve had the chance to go into a completely different field in terms of my magic path – arena shows. I got asked to create illusions for 50 Cent’s The Final Lap Tour . Suddenly, instead of having 1200 people in a theatre watching what I’d created, I had 20,000. It’s a completely different format, since I had to create a 360° experience without the usual sideline boundaries offered by theatrical venues. Last year, I was also asked to make Kacey Musgraves levitate for her tour. Without giving too much away when it comes to how levitations work; it’s virtually impossible to do it from a 360° perspective. When I was asked to do it, I told the team they had to manage their expectations. It took a lot of adapting and some clever lighting once again – as well as the use of a massive LED wall – and we got there in the end. It actually turned out very well.
Back to the Future: The Musical required many tricky moves with the legendary DeLorean
I love creating the actual
illusion, but I love building everything around it also. How will we construct the entire scene, rather than just one moment?
What were some of the key lessons when moving into arenas? One of the main learning curves was on the operational side of things. I’ve always predominantly worked in a theatrical setting. Even when I did the CBeebies arena tours – that was still a theatre setting in terms of management. I learned that whenever I have to do an illusion scene for an arena show, I do need a dedicated team just to look after that scene. In theatre, the show team can take responsibility for it, but in arenas you can’t rely on that, as there’s so much more for the production team to be handling and you can’t expect that to be maintained. You have to look at the magic as a department in itself, just as the sound elements have a sound team. How does it feel putting so much time into creating moments that could be under a second in duration? That’s what the magic is all about! Yes, a lot goes into just a few seconds of the show, but that’s where the creative director side of me comes in. I love creating the actual illusion, but I also
love building everything around it. How will we construct the entire scene, rather than just that one moment? For example, with 50 Cent’s tour, the opening scene is probably a good three minutes long. I worked closely with the incredibly cool opening scene. We start with anticipation – in this case we used sirens and shadows – which all build up to the final moment when 50 Cent appears inside his empty box full of smoke and everyone is hyped up and has their phones out. It’s magical. With Kacey Musgraves, the levitation scene also has a build-up. The arc of the levitation is a series of suspenseful beats until the central moment. You have to come up with ways of making people enjoy that moment rather than feeling challenged and thinking, ‘oh they’re trying to be clever’. It’s more about creating a dream. show’s creative director, Daniel Richardson, to come up with an The word ‘immersive’ gets thrown about pretty often in the live space. How do you define it? To me, the most important thing about an immersive experience is that it’s the opposite of a passive experience. So, you’re not sitting in a theatre watching something you’re not part of. For me, immersive is when the audience are actively engaged in discovering the journey of the experience.
50 Cent’s The Final Lap Tour had a dramatic opening in which the man himself burst out in a haze of smoke
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