Thirty Seconds to Mars 'Monolith' Tour

Thirty Seconds to Mars has embarked on the North American leg of its ‘Monolith’ 2018 world tour. The arena and stadium tour began in Basel, Switzerland in March and will conclude in September in Milan. In between two European legs the American rock band, with frontman actor Jared Leto, played summer dates in Canada, the US and Mexico. disguise accompanied the tour, with the 4x4pro driving dynamic LED video cubes onstage.

The scope and creative elements of this tour have been the bands largest and most innovative to date. True to the tour name, the opening act sees the band encapsulated inside a giant monolith structure built out of six LED walls. After the band emerges the giant LED walls create a variety of different lighting effects throughout the show, at points creating ominous mood lighting and at other points joining above the stage to illuminate the whole space.

“Each LED wall is one face of the cube, which all come together with automation. There are also two IMAG screens,” says Lukas Sarralde of Mandrake Studios, LLC in Los Angeles California, which provides Notch content and more recently disguise programming, operation, and projection mapping studies.

Lukas chose the 4x4pro “to allow the grandMA2 lighting console to control several mapping modes and banks via SockPuppet DMX. This was useful because the lighting director was able to choose any map, content on the fly or created presets in grandMA2 to control the six LED surfaces and two IMAGs. disguise also is a great solution because I’m able to run the show with SockPuppet DMX and timecode using MultiTransport.”

He is a big fan of SockPuppet DMX, which he calls “an amazing solution. It is very simple to configure and program via Art-Net to the grandMA2… disguise is definitely the tool for this level of work.”

Lukas gives kudos to the MultiTransport function. “Having multiple options programmed allows me to monitor any functionality of the show and to help (or back up) the grandMA2 in case the console loses control of the visuals.”

Lukas also made use of disguise’s 3D previs capabilities. "Using previs is a must for every single concert during the tour since grandMA2 didn’t have previs compatible with Sock Puppet.” He adds that thanks to previs and MultiTransport “we’ve been able to make several changes almost at the last minute every day. I’ve even been able to show the client how well disguise performs when understudies need to be used in case of failover during the concerts. But the system is performing perfectly; the server performance is fantastic!”