Mitski

Jessica Sanders, Tour Lighting Crew chief and Consultant, sheds light on the tour with Mitski and Follow-Me.

I was asked to join the Mitski camp around December of last year. Lighting Designer Andi Watson used Follow-Me for Mitski’s 2024 “The Land is Inhospitable and So Are We” Tour and of course wanted to use it again for this years “Nothing’s About to Happen” tour design.

The idea was something efficient and portable- I can set it up in a matter of minutes and is a smaller footprint as we will be freighting equipment from North America to Europe to Australia and finally on to Asia, where the tour will end. In the past I have built out large custom Follow-Me racks, so this is the first time I spec’d out the system to be functional out of a 4U SKB rack which is honestly more realistic for a lot of touring productions. Truck space is always valuable, every inch or centimeter counts. This is why I love the scalability of this system, it can be built out as large and complex as you want it or it can be simple and compact in a portable rack and small pelicans.

A lot of the challenges that pop up for me are generally network and data distribution related. I have included sub-rented Luminex Nodes inside of our portable rack that can be used to link the Follow-Me fixtures when a vendor or venue has all DMX routed via NPUs and opto splitters. I have noticed that this is the case for tons of lighting houses around the world and now make a personal node a requirement when touring with a Follow-Me system. The parameter window inside the software assists the monitoring of all DMX control data and I have been able to help troubleshoot quite a few problems using this window alone.

Since we have lighting vendors providing our overhead rig that may not have our preferred fixture (Acme Lyra) I have also been using the help of the “fixture prediction” feature. We had Ayrton Domino LT and they needed some extra help keeping up with Mitski onstage. She can be super quick- jumping, dancing, from one side of the stage to the other. If you blink she’s gone- so I am thankful I am able to dial in my locally provided follow spot fixture to track her effortlessly. The Follow-Me system has provided me with the tools to have tracking consistency for every show.

Working with the Follow-Me System has become a niche specialization of mine over the last few years. To answer your question of “What does working with Follow-Me mean for you?” I would have to reiterate everything I just stated about consistency, efficiency, scalable, dependable. Honestly there are so many more adjectives I may be missing there. But one thing this system has brought me, personally, is a network of some of the most amazing work colleagues. It has been a pleasure getting to work with Andi on this, he is a truly remarkable designer. I love working with different designers who all rely on and use the Follow-Me system in different ways to achieve the desired look and feel for the artist’s show. Gone are the days where you can only change gels or intensity for your spots, you can now incorporate all sorts of effects and parameters that fully integrates with the other lights in the show. Any designer who uses the system knows that it is an excellent tool that can breathe life into any production.

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