Atlas Studios designs for The Cat Empire ahead of expanding to Europe

The Cat Empire brought their new studio album Bird in Paradise to life on stage this August and September. Known for their high-octane performances and global fan base, they performed a show brimming with energy, passion, and soul-stirring music.

Melbourne-based Atlas Studios, comprising Matt Jones and Thomas Herterich, delivered a stunning and original lighting design on a limited budget. The lighting was as joyful, colourful and lively as the band.

“We have always been given a lot of free rein with The Cat Empire,” commented Matt Jones. “Among ourselves, however, we wanted to deliver a design that was different from the other designs we had done for them in the past.”

The design that Atlas Studios needed to create was a touring package that could be easily toured and fit into a wide range of venues around Australia. The touring package design they settled on needed to meet the usual common criteria for many Australian touring bands – it had to be budget-friendly, easily accessible in all states around Australia, and it needed to be flexible enough to suit the diverse genre of music for which The Cat Empire is known.

The touring package was crucial in maintaining a relatively consistent look and feel from show to show throughout this run, while also enabling seamless integration with venue house rigs. The floor package needed to fit into venues of all sizes whilst not taking up too much stage space – particularly for a band with as many musicians as The Cat Empire.

“We knew roughly what venues we would be playing in, so we were able to factor in most venues’ limitations in the floor package,” explained Thomas Herterich. “We needed to keep in mind the ‘tour-ability’ of any design we came up with.”

The design ultimately took inspiration from The Cat Empire’s recent album artwork, which is vibrantly colourful and features a heavy emphasis on floral elements. 

“We utilised 20 Astera NYX Globes with custom flower surrounds, eleven of which were hung at random spacings and heights across the back of the stage, which were spaced between 5 x 5m custom floral vines,” said Thomas. “Each custom vine incorporated 100 full RGB LED bud lights, each individually controllable. The remaining nine Astera NYX Globes with custom floral surrounds were placed around the band on stage.”

In addition, there were twelve Martin MAC Ones, hung in clusters of three, on verticals with the vines. Across the back of the stage, there were five MAC Aura XIPs, 4 x MAC Vipers, ten ShowPRO Fusion Bar QXVs and four CuePix Warm White Blinders.

On the downstage edge of the drum riser, there were an additional six MAC Ones, situated between more custom floral pieces that dressed the front of all the risers.
On either side of the stage, there were three SGM P5S to provide side colour wash for the band. 

“One of the biggest challenges for The Cat Empire is their rather extensive catalogue of songs to program!” commented Thomas. “The band do not use a click track, so there is no possibility to incorporate timecode into the show, as there is so much fluidity in their performance. They will often run with an instrumental riff that can be longer or shorter, depending on the crowd’s vibe. For this reason, we incorporate a busk element into all songs to cater to this, and also maintain a wholly separate busk page that allows for any back-catalogue songs that might be added to the setlist unexpectedly.”

All of Atlas Studio’s shows are programmed on MA Lighting grandMA3 these days, and The Cat Empire was no different. With the ability to adapt to varying house rigs made so much easier with grandMA3, it was an obvious choice for them to continue using a product and platform they love and trust.

“The show was programmed by Ben Kocsis and was fully live, with no timecode,” added Matt. “Each song is fairly structured to continue to provide the consistency between shows, with busk elements added into the songs as needed.”

The touring package was supplied by Phaseshift for the Melbourne show, and Chameleon supplied the shows in NSW and Queensland. The custom floral set pieces were created and provided by Kate Beere. The custom LED bud lights were manufactured and provided by Josh Heron.

In-house rigs were used to lift the touring package, and they varied across venues. 

With growing requests coming from the UK and Europe, Atlas Studios is now expanding its presence in that region to better support and facilitate its growing client base.

Credits:

Lighting and Production Design: Atlas Studios
Lighting Designer and Director: Thomas Herterich
Assistant LD and Programmer: Ben Kocsis 
Lighting Suppliers: Phaseshift and Chameleon 
Set Design: Kate Beere