Video technology in live and broadcast entertainment has come a long way. Two luminaries who’ve consistently pushed its creative boundaries are Bob Bonniol and Tobias Rylander. Now, in a wide-ranging conversation, the two explore the evolution of video in live music, the creative potential of the Hippotizer MX Series, and why they believe that the future lies in treating every pixel, surface and light source as the same type of instrument.
Technology forces relentless change, and over the years video has crept steadily into lighting’s domain. The convergence of lighting and video is hardly new. What’s still exciting is how it manifests creatively – on stage, on screen, and in the blurring of the line between the digital and the physical.
Few careers track this convergence as closely as Bob Bonniol and Tobias Rylander’s. Each was shaped by it, and each has, in turn, shaped how the wider industry has come to use it. In a recent conversation, Bonniol, now Chief Innovation Officer for Green Hippo, tvONE, and Magenta under ACT Entertainment, sat down with Rylander, the touring and production designer behind Bleachers, The 1975, Childish Gambino, Chappell Roan, and the Royal Swedish Opera, to trace that influence – how it’s inspired them creatively, and what they have yet to explore.
This is a trajectory that’s left them both with the same core belief, one Rylander describes as follows:
“Video as lighting and lighting as video. I’ve always seen them as the same thing.” Or, more bluntly: “Every pixel, whether it’s from a projector, a light, or a video screen, is a light source.”
However, for both designers, the instinct to treat video as a lighting instrument didn’t arrive with LED walls or media servers. For Bonniol, it goes back to the early 1990s, when he and his colleagues tried to physically hack equipment that was never created to talk to a lighting console. As Bonniol recalls: “We were trying to turn Video Toasters into DMX-controllable media servers – years before ‘media server’ was even a category!”
In fact, that hunger for external, console-based control is what drew Bonniol to Green Hippo when it first appeared in the industry: “What I always loved about Hippotizer was it was built to be controlled from outside.” As a self-described “tactile designer” whose career began running lights in a bar in Providence, Rhode Island, Bonniol wanted the ability to busk a show live: “I want at least the opportunity to commit it to time code myself,” he states.
Rylander’s entry point came a generation later, but his curiosity and desire to bend technology to his will, regardless of how it described itself on the label, was similar. In fact, long before he ever used video professionally, he says he became famous for being “the lighting guy travelling with the artist, carrying a small amount of equipment in a trailer at the back of the bus, and busking shows.”
But it was his first conceptual production, the XX’s 2012 Coexist tour, that provided the turning point, where video further enhanced his artistic palette. For this show, he built a three-dimensional Perspex “X” that filled with smoke. His aim was to project directly into the haze, which he mockingly describes as “every creative director’s fucking dream.”
XX’s Coexist Tour
When Rylander moved his projectors behind the object and pointed them upwards and outwards, at the audience, he saw something that felt so much more exciting than his original idea: volumetric aerial projection, using moving projected images in the air rather than on a surface.
As it happened, the programmer running that show was programming video using an early Hippotizer media server. That was 14 years ago, and Rylander has not looked back. Since his first hands-on encounter with Green Hippo, he has used it for almost all his shows.
This connects Bonniol’s “DMX-hacked Video Toaster” in a mid-’90s club to Rylander’s smoke-filled Perspex sculpture on a 2012 tour. Both evolved from the same creative, open-minded vision. The recognition that video content’s potential is as huge as a designer’s desire and ability to manipulate it as they would a fixture, in real time, from the same place they control everything else.
For them, it is not about pre-made content being mapped to screens but rather how creatively you design and deploy such content across the very many pixels available to you, whether they be screens, lighting fixtures or three-dimensional objects.
Rylander explains where assumptions can lead to high costs and little creative flexibility: “Productions will spend tens of thousands of dollars on video content, and then that’s that… it is going up on these screens no matter what.” However, running that same content through a system like Hippotizer can turn what started as a fixed asset into a live instrument: “You can use it as paint and brush, strobe white over it, tune the colour to what you want, pull the colour out. It’s so easy, just like a gobo in a moving light.”
Bonniol concurs, asserting that: “Content is a fixture in its own right.”
This is also why both designers lean so heavily on live masking – using real-time key and blend layers to carve light out of content in a similar way to how a follow spot can shape and distort spaces and objects in an otherwise dark room. Rylander says this is an indispensable part of his creative thinking: “I use the live mask all the time… it’s like a follow spot.”
That same logic is driving what Bonniol is bringing to the entertainment technology market. In fact Green Hippo recently launched its latest media server product, Estuary, at the PLASA Show in London. Continuing the company’s river-themed naming convention, Estuary is built, like the Hippotizer line before it, to be “controlled from outside.” However, this time control is via DMX, unifying screen control with lighting control on a single console.
Bonniol frames the problem the new Estuary system is designed to solve: “The common issue, on large-scale shows, is that ideas can get lost as they pass through “four different kinds of consoles and control systems,” some of which can be operated by teams “sixteen bodies deep!”
Rylander, who uses the previsualization program Depence, concurs, saying he still insists on programming as much as possible himself, in the room. To be able to manipulate content at speed and direct it to where he wants it, in three-dimensional space, is critical. He stresses: “To just be able to grab things and program them fast. Plus, only having to communicate with one person rather than two, is so valuable to me.”
But this convergence story is not just about the technical constraints and opportunities, it is also about the cultural influences affecting the industry and how design is informed. The provocation for anyone, when thinking about where design is headed, is complex.
Today, many visual references are sourced from the digital domain, delivered by algorithms that already think they know you and your industry. Rylander has a term for the phenomenon he says is intensifying all the time: “creative inflation.” His analysis is that every artist, creative director, and designer is now fed the same reference images by the same platforms. “All of a sudden, everyone has got the same visual references,” he says of Pinterest and Instagram in particular. “A designer finds a striking image from an old opera or a German theatre production and thinks they’ve struck gold – without realising the rest of the music industry was given the same algorithm in the same week.” The result, he says, is that entire tours, built independently by totally separate teams, can end up looking identical: “Sometimes client mood boards have pictures of my show without knowing that it was me who did it,” he chuckles.
Bonniol agrees and expresses further concern when it comes to the industry’s latest favorite tool. “I especially think that in this era AI is multiplying that ‘creative inflation.” Bonniol goes on to argue that generative systems compound an already-homogenising feedback loop: “the algorithms are sampling and resampling and remixing and replacing, and it gets even deeper… inflation inflates even farther than it might have otherwise.”
Both designers’ response to that flattening of the creative research library is not to abandon technology but to point it in other directions.
Bleachers Tour – Photo: JORDAN CURTIS HUGHES
For Rylander’s recent production for The Bleachers, rather than sourcing ideas via Pinterest, he chose to build the show around a concept he’d banked for seventeen years. Rylander chose “real materials,” such as dark hardwood panelling and custom-made fixtures, built from glass cylinders housing towers of incandescent bulbs. He also used low-pressure sodium lamps to deliver a monochrome stage. This was layered with an overhead rig, comprising state-of-the-art GLP JDC2 fixtures, which can receive NDI video feeds. Rather than feed conventional lighting commands, Rylander chose to film the show’s incandescent bulbs on his phone and then feed that footage back into the JDC2s. He was delighted with the outcome, stating: “It was great to see the most high-tech fixtures that are in my rig look like old incandescent bulbs.”
Bonniol has been chasing a version of the same instinct at Sphere, where his team’s first move on a recent show was to turn off elements of the automated visualization pipeline entirely and build a scene the operators could busk live, working alongside creative studio Sturdy and ‘creative technology wizards’, Prizmax. In the most heavily engineered venue in the touring business, Bonniol says, the goal was to “take that leash off and make it completely human performative.”
Rylander’s interpretation of the broader trends in design echoes that: “What I’m recognizing… is that ‘real’ is the new thing… it’s gonna go back to be analog and real and physically there in the room. The technology is only there for us to achieve what we need to achieve. It’s not there to show off technology per se.”
Both designers have long looked beyond flat content on screens, towards using any source of light as an architectural, volumetric medium. So, when Bonniol asks Rylander what he feels is still untested or unbuilt, Rylander refers to his work on the most recent Childish Gambino production. This was built around a Glowmotion installation of 1024 custom-made two-meter rods on individual winches, capable of volumetric video and live 3D capture. Rylander refers to this design as his “masterpiece”. Sadly, it was a show that was only seen by relatively few fans, after the artist fell ill and the tour was cancelled.
Childish Gambino
From that project, Rylander has carried forward an interest in how he can include lasers in his palette and escape their own cliché: “I wanted to see how far we can push lasers in terms of using them in a more architectural way… there needs to be a laser show. It’s just not been done to my liking yet.”
Rylander’s restless curiosity, when it comes to applying familiar tools in unfamiliar ways, ensures his work invariably jumps out of any Instagram feed of live show images.
So where will the next leap come from? Bonniol believes it will come from collaborating and listening to creatives and designers who treat every pixel and surface – LED, laser, incandescent, screen or fog – as one continuous instrument, manipulated and played from one place, in the room, live.
What perhaps gives Bonniol and Rylander such far-reaching perspective is, while many designers tend to specialize in niche genres, they’ve both worked across concert, opera, fashion, and broadcast. Both designers agree that when it came to the trajectory of their careers, there was no plan. Just a healthy artistic curiosity and a willingness to try anything once! They took their time to develop their ideas, went down a few blind alleys but never wrote any idea off, often recycling old ideas years later. For them, every experience has cross-fertilized another, revealed alternative ways of applying predefined technology to ultimately find new ways of working.
For Bonniol and Rylander, nothing is finished until it’s live. In an industry racing toward more fixed, more automated, more ‘locked’ production pipelines, that refusal to commit early might be the most radical notion in the room.
For a more detailed insight check out the video of the discussion between Bob and Tobias below.
Photo Credit: Tobias Rylander