LIGHTING GURU PAINTS MANY SHADES OF WHITE
Lüz Studio creates complex visual design for rocker’s Boarding House Reach tour
The entire visual design for Jack White’s Boarding House Reach world tour was created in a nondescript building in Rosemont.
Matthieu Larivée’s Lüz Studio has done the production and lighting design for tours featuring Broken Bells, Panic! At the Disco and Foster the People, but landing the job to create the visuals for White’s tour is the biggest gig yet for the happening Montreal company.
White’s tour kicked off in April in his hometown of Detroit and touches down in la belle province in November with gigs at Place Bell in Laval on Nov. 10 and Centre Vidéotron in Quebec City on Nov. 12.
White shares a management company with Broken Bells; his managers asked Larivée and Lüz to make a pitch to do the tour’s visuals. They gave Larivée only two hints as to what White was looking for: the visuals had to be blue and involve the number 3.
So Larivée and his team spent a couple of weeks this year coming up with around 20 renderings of what they’d like to do for White’s shows and emailed the file off to management. A conference call later, management was sold on the Montreal company and pitched them to White. Soon enough, Lüz had the job.
In an interview this week at the company’s headquarters just north of the train tracks in Rosemont, Larivée was happy
to say he holds the official title of artistic director, production designer and lighting designer for the tour.
Here’s how influential music biz magazine Billboard described Larivée’s handiwork, in a review of the Detroit show: “An extensive lighting display bathed White and company in a variety of moods, while a three-panel video screen displayed onstage close-ups, graphics, some prepared video material and even some humorous band member antics. Leading up to the show, White was pictured going in and out of a studio, adjusting a clock counting down to the start of the show.”
They created a lighting plan (all blue, of course) and short animated videos, and it all had to work for one of the few arena shows where there is no set list. White makes it up as he goes along, choosing from a catalogue of 70 songs. In other words, the show is quite different every night.
“From November to April, the only thing I did is Jack White,” said Larivée. “Because I knew there was no set list, I listened to all the music all the time to be able to understand his world and try to be cohesive (with the visuals) for an old White Stripes song or the new stuff that’s more Frank Zappa style. I was trying to get a visual link for all of those elements together. I watched live shows on YouTube. So when I stepped into Jack’s world, I think he knew we were into it.”
Larivée went so far as to tape a blue gel all over the glass walls in his office to create what they called the Blue Room. They also created 40 mood boards for 40 songs.
Lüz, which works on around
50 projects each year, also works with local TV producers and networks and corporate clients. One project coming up involves providing the visuals for a major Bombardier product launch in Denver.
Lüz was founded in 2005, but only kicked into high gear in 2012. The company has also done video and visual design work for the Quebec awards shows Artis and Prix Gémeaux, and is developing a new visual look for the Roy Thomson Hall galas at the Toronto International Film Festival.
Larivée got into the visual content business by doing the lights for local comics. He notes that Montreal has been a great place for innovative high-tech visual entrepreneurs for years, thanks to companies like Ubisoft, Cirque du Soleil and the pioneering software special effects group Softimage.
“We’re pushing the boundaries all the time, and I think the fact that we don’t have much money to do it with makes us even more innovative,” Larivée said of Montreal visual companies. “Our strength is being able to do everything.”
Of course Larivée has thought of making the move to Los Angeles to be closer to the centre of the film and music businesses, but he decided there’s no reason he can’t build his own little empire from right here in Rosemont.