Professional Lighting & Production - Summer 2019 | Page 23

Early concept render for Dog Blood at Buku by Mike808
“It’s a little more raw and crude and techno than what they do
individually.”
He left the restaurant with a head full of ideas, frantically scrib-
bling and sketching in the back of an Uber en route to his studio.
Whereas he typically begins his designs from a visual per-
spective, either in 3D software or with detailed sketches, Risueño
says that, in this case, he started mostly with words: analog over
digital; synthetic but not sterile; raw but stylized; fun but not silly;
minimal but still immersive…
All of those words made their way into the aforementioned
PDF that Risueño sent his client shortly after their dinner meeting.
Beneath them all was a simple question: “How do we achieve
analog and synthetic in a stage show nowadays?” with an even
simpler answer: “Fuck video, do lasers.”
“You usually need to keep in mind the vibe of the two musicians,
but Skrillex and Boys Noize do something really different together
than what they do individually, so I didn’t even try to think of their
individual shows; I started from scratch and tried to approach it
purely based on Dog Blood music and images and nothing else,”
Risueño says about his general approach to this project – and
that’s largely what inspired his focus on lasers.
Whereas Production Club’s designs for Skrillex and others at
the top of the EDM hierarchy usually abandon restraint in favour
of more exciting and explosive elements – as was literally the case
with their design for The Chainsmokers’ headlining set at Ultra
2019, which was loaded with pyro – that’s really the antithesis of
the raw, underground, punk rock aesthetic that Dog Blood has
embraced.
“LED walls are so bright and in-your-face that a lot of times,
they can feel a bit impersonal,” Risueño offers. “We wanted a show
that was synthetic but also analog, so we avoided digital elements
like LED screens and contemporary RGBW fixtures. In my mind,
lasers are kind of the ‘darkest’ light, because all the light is concen-
trated into the beams, so you get the beams and colours but no
bleed or wash.”
Again, the aesthetic they were going for was rooted in the
punk and rave cultures that peaked in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s,
and fortunately, that brought Risueño back to his formative years
growing up in Spain.
“I had this memory from when I was a kid of playing with
oscilloscopes and phosphor-based toys, which led to the next big
idea,” he recalls.
That idea was to put a massive cyclorama-style canvas behind
the band that was coated with a phosphor paint, “so when the
phosphor reacts with the laser, it creates this after-image that
stays on the screen for, like, three seconds,” he explains. “That felt
like a very analog expression and something you don’t see much
of today.”
As for the content the lasers would be relaying onto the
canvas, Production Club used a two-pronged approach. First,
they tapped some animators to make custom looks based on
Dog Blood imagery that dropped at key moments of the show
and anchored the loose narrative that ran throughout the set; the
majority, though, was generic content from libraries dating back
to the late ‘80s and early ‘90s that was basically rotoscoped by the
lasers.
“That stuff was really lowbrow and matched the punk, campy,
raw look,” says Risueño. “We sat down together and went through,
I don’t know, like 600 animations and decided what we might
want to use on the show.”
Their back-and-forth throughout the process was friendly and
informal, as Risueño has a relatively close relationship with the
two artists, Moore in particular.
Summer 2019 | 23