Follow-Me At Heart Of Luke Combs' My Kinda Saturday Night Tour

Country star Luke Combs has recently wrapped the UK leg of his My Kinda Saturday Night Tour, a run of major international stadium dates that included Edinburgh, Slane Castle in Ireland, and a three-night stint at London's Wembley Stadium, closing on August 2nd. The tour continues with further international and North American festival and stadium appearances, and at the center of the show's lighting design is Follow-Me 3D, the performer tracking system that keeps Combs consistently and precisely lit across every venue.

The show is designed by Silver Bullets Design, the creative production and lighting design company co-founded by Combs' lighting director Kevin Northrup, working alongside Combs' production manager Jerry Slone. The Follow-Me system itself was supplied by Special Event Services (SES), a Concert Stuff Group company. Northrup has worked with Combs since December 2017 and has delivered well over 400 shows with him to date.

Running the Follow-Me system on the tour is Josh Cox, who joined the production in 2021 as systems architect and Follow-Me programmer, and who has also taken on the role of lead operator, running Combs' own target. Cox and Northrup first worked together at SES more than 15 years ago. "He's smart, a hard worker, a great hang, and never says no to any of the crazy ideas I've thrown his way," says Northrup.

Alongside Cox, a rotating team of lighting technicians run the show's other two targets, learning the show and the band members well enough that, at times, Northrup has been able to hand performer tracking duties over to Cox and his team entirely while he focuses on other aspects of the production. It is this level of trust in the system's workflow that has contributed to the show’s smooth running night after night.

"Follow-Me is the most important system for Luke's show's aesthetic," Northrup explains. "We strive to maintain consistent, high-quality lighting on Luke at all times."

Both Northrup and Cox learned lighting for camera while working with Jeff Cranfill, a founder of SES who also designs for Joyce Meyer Ministries' broadcast shows, and they have carried those broadcast-quality lessons onto Combs' tour ever since. Every fixture is calibrated using a color meter to achieve a neutral white point, with Follow-Me allowing those lighting looks to be hyper-localized to wherever Combs happens to be on stage, with in-the-round staging bringing its own challenges.

"I never compromise on the quality of the light hitting Luke, and in-the-round shows are inherently tricky to light well," says Northrup. "You need more fixtures than you might think to keep the angles from becoming too severe, which causes excessive shadows on the face for cameras. However, you can't leave all the fixtures on constantly because they'll spend more time lighting up obstructions like the video walls and speaker arrays than the intended targets."

Running basic light tests in a visualizer, Northrup determined that eight locations in the audience, generally sited around the 200's level of seating and varying venue to venue, would provide the best angles on Combs from anywhere on stage. That same visualizer work established the need for two cameras and two Follow-Me servers to run the system. Each of the eight positions carries four Ayrton EagleStrike LT fixtures, with two per position calibrated specifically for Follow-Me and the remaining two given over to stage and thrust lighting, totalling 16 fixtures on Follow-Me across the audience.

Programming relied heavily on communication between the grandMA console and the Follow-Me servers, work Northrup describes as an enormous challenge to attempt without the right resources on hand. SES lent its Pre-Viz suite, consoles, and Follow-Me servers for the entire show-development process, giving the team the room to build the system properly before it reached the road.

“Being in that room with my friends working on this mega project was one of the best moments of my career,” recalls Northrup.

Part of this development came from an accidental discovery: while setting up the system for a different show, Cox found that Follow-Me includes a lens profile for a Capture viewport. Taking two video outputs from the visualizer computer and directing one to each Follow-Me server, and with some PosiStageNet configuration, the team were able to run both servers directly inside the visualizer and plan the show's Follow-Me use well ahead of load-in.

The system's flexibility extended well beyond tracking Combs himself. On the show's X-shaped thrusts, Acme Pixel Line IP fixtures were installed as footlights, intended to switch on only when Combs was near them. Rather than build a separate control solution, the team used Follow-Me's proximity feature, a tool typically used to bring static fixtures like Source Fours or Par Cans into the software via a DMX channel, and routed that DMX output into the grandMA as DMX remotes, triggering sequences that override all other playbacks on the console. "This worked flawlessly," says Northrup.

The most demanding piece of programming addressed the in-the-round venue's inherent obstructions. Because video walls and speaker arrays block sightlines at different points around the room, no more than four of the audience fixtures can be on Combs at any given moment, leaving the rest of the rig sitting idle for long stretches of the show. To solve this, Northrup wanted the ability to dynamically and automatically pull fixtures out of the song programming and place them into a follow spot look in real time, which in his words, "required serious programming... but it worked well."

"No other performer tracking system can do what this system can," Northrup says. "We are very proud of what we have accomplished with it."

"Luke Combs' tour shows exactly what Follow-Me is capable of at the top end of touring: a huge in-the-round stadium show where the lighting has to be flawless from every angle, every night, in different venues,” concludes Erik Berends, Technical Director at Follow-Me. “Kevin, Josh, and the whole team have pushed the system further than we've seen it used before, from the proximity feature driving footlights to the way they've built Follow-Me into their pre-production workflow. It's a brilliant example of what's possible when a great crew really makes the system their own."

@concertstuffgroup / @specialeventservices

Photo Credit: David Bergman

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