Melanie Martinez’s Trilogy tour represents the convergence of 3 album cycles that culminates in an epic 3 act journey through nearly every song on each of her three albums - “Cry Baby,” “K-12” and “Portals.”
AOIN Involvement: All of it Now was first contacted by renowned Production Designer Arlo Guthrie to program her Portals Tour in 2024, with that relationship blooming into the 2024 Trilogy Tour. The tour featured a large upstage wall, with an exceptionally clever use of projection scrim, that added a whole layer of dimensionality to the show, especially when paired with the automation lifts from Tait Towers. All of it Now created Notch IMAG looks to complement the look and feel of the screen content, which was expertly crafted and created by the team at Normal. In addition to the creative camera treatments, All of it Now also used Notch The show ran on the disguise gx3’s, which was selected for both creative and technical reasons. The high performance of the gx3 allowed for limitless creative potential in the Notch looks, which featured Notch’s background removal, to great effect. Disguise was also especially useful as a previz tool. Understanding the impact of the scrim on the upstage wall content was crucial, as well as being able to visualize the lift automation data, and the upstage wall as a cohesive creative concept.
Technical Challenges: Automation data was sent to the servers via Tait Navigator, which sends positional information of the lifts with the Posi-Stage-Net (PSN) protocol. This data provided millimeter level accuracy of the position of the platforms, which ended up driving a number of creative effects in the show. One of the most impressive generative elements of the show was the use of the lift tracking data for “Class Fight”, in which a playground see-saw receives PSN data, and moves the lift up and down in real time. It was vital for this element to be driven by real time data, so that in the event of a lift failure, or the artist going up on the lift late, the content for the lift was responsive to the real world, rather than keyframed in advance. For other songs, like “Strawberry Shortcake”, or “Alphabet Boy”, the lift data was used to drive the projection scrim element, so that the scrim content could be properly lined up to the lift position flawlessly night after night.
The Result: The tour has been a huge success, with critical acclaim from fans of both her latest work and her earliest work, performing to sold out crowds across 27 US venues, with over 375,000 tickets sold. The tour continues on to Europe in Fall 2024.
