Fleshgod Apocalypse
An Evening In Perugia
live DVD stage design – lighting and SFX design
The collaboration with Fleshgod Apocalypse started long time ago, back in 2015. After hundreds of live shows and tours all around the world, in September 2018 we filmed a live DVD in their hometown, Perugia, in the middle of Italy.
For this special show, we had a half-tail piano and a full strings quintet on stage, together with a wuite big lighting and SFX production.
This live performance was released in may 2019 as a bonus DVD of their new album “Veleno”.
The show
Since this is the first live DVD of the band’s history and their music is an extreme death metal with a lot of orchestral and symphonic influences, we decided to bring something more realistic on stage to highlight this theatrical aspect of the band.
The setlist included the most symphonic songs of the discography, together with the band’s more extreme and popular hits.
On standard shows, we always have an upright piano, but for this show, we opted for a half-tail piano on thestage-right of the drums riser for a more classical look of the pianist. We didn’t rent a grand piano because on the same riser we needed space for the opera singer and her mic stand.
Together with this, we also had a full strings quintet on the left of the drums, to have live orchestral elements, balancing the space on stage between the sides of the drums riser. The classical part included 2 violins, 1 viola, 1 cello and a double bass.
The lighting setup
I started working on the lighting project 1 month before the show, to make sure all the venue’s system was placed in the right way as my stage plan and to rent all the SFX and fixtures I needed to make the show happen.
For this, I built up the stage on the Chamsys visualizer (desk that I use the most) and sent the local techs my lighting plot. Since there were a lot of musicians and instruments on stage, the positioning aspect was very important.
The venue where we filmed this live performance had a really nice lighting system, made of moving heads like beams and washes, blinder, hazers and front illumination. However the floor setup was completely absent, so we integrated it with our standard touring gear such as LED spots, strobes and SFX like confetti and CO2 geyser.
The show was developed primarily in backlight, giving the stage an ambient color based on the song, with spots and beams giving dynamics.
4 strobes were used in vertical position on the floor, to avoid flashes to the orchestral musicians and have a nice light bouncing from the backdrop to the crowd.
The geysers were placed in the front of the stage and right down the risers, to give more depth to the whole stage. They were actual CO2 geysers with 4x110kg bottles and in a small venue like this it was pretty challenging to hide all of them, without compromising the security of both crew and audience.
The confetti were placed on the side of the stage, pointing the space above the singer and were used on the last song of the setlist as “Grand Finale”.
The video excerpt
The release
This Blue-Ray is released as bonus disc of the last album of the band, called “Veleno”.
Release on May, 24th 2019 by Nuclearblast Records.
Filmed by Lafresia Media Production
Lighting/SFX project and execution by ChaoticBench
Mixed and edited by MIDAS Productions
Venue: Afterlife Club, Perugia (IT)