ANN ARBOR, MI - About 15 seconds into the University of Michigan Marching Band’s Sept. 11 halftime performance, more than 108,000 in attendance let out a collective expression of awe.
The usual appreciation for the precision of the band evolved into glowing admiration as the band’s all-white uniforms started lighting up. At first, the 400-plus band members lined up in maize and blue colors to spell out “heroes” in memoriam of the 20th anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
As the band moved on to playing “Mambo” from “West Side Story,” the colors started oscillating between red, white and blue. Each transition to a new song and a new color let out that same collective awe or raucous cheers.
The vivid lighting effects raised the question: How did they do it? The answer: It took more practice and coordination than any other show the band has performed, said its director John Pasquale.
Pasquale and Richard Frey, the band’s assistant director, started collaborating with Timothy Durant and his Los Angeles-based company Pix Mob back in March. While Frey created the formations and he and Pasquale perfected the band’s movements, Durant’s job was to provide the LED lights and other technological logistics to make the show pop.
Before that, the trio needed a concept. Once the announcement came that the game would fall on the 20th anniversary of 9/11, Pasquale and Frey sought to create a show that struck a balance between reverence and celebration.
Finding that tone was one of the bigger challenges, Frey said.
“I think a heavy-handed, kind of somber halftime show would have paid tribute, but would not have been met with the same sort of emotional response,” he said.
The show, called “We Remember,” expressed themes of unity through immense tragedy, Pasquale said, echoing the togetherness the nation felt after Sept. 11, 2001. The show needed to be “patriotic on a big scale,” Durant said, but also “human and intimate.”
To push the envelope toward that bigger scale, Frey reached out to Durant, whose work includes the opening ceremony of the 2018 Sochi Olympics and a 2014 UM halftime show performance. Durant’s job was to take the position data of where every band member would be at each moment and synchronize the lights accordingly.
“We were able to take those random numbers -- one for every musician, and then extras for the flags and hats. We ended up with something like 650, 660 individual lights,” Durant said. “And then based on Richard’s task list of all of these people, we then assigned those individually one by one to everybody in the band. We were able to control each one individually.”
The later announcement for the night game and the complexity of the technology took days as long as 18 hours the week before the final performance, Durant said.
After months and months of Zoom meetings, as well as delivering the band uniforms and gear affixed with the lights, Durant embedded with the band the week of the performance. The trio established “a bit of a command post” at Revelli Hall, the band’s rehearsal building, he said.
The final week involved finishing the marching band’s drill routine, setting up the flood lighting, coordinating the overhead blimp and figuring out how to eliminate as much ambient light to maximize the light effects.
Perhaps the most stunning aspect of the preparation for the show, though, is that there was only one full rehearsal done with lighting effects before the game.
That’s right. One.
“That night, we’re trying to figure out how to coordinate specific flooding of lights and all kinds of directions and time changes and all kinds of things,” Pasquale said. “But the first true run-through we did with everything was live on Saturday.”
Despite the technological and time challenges, the show exceeded Pasquale, Frey and Durant’s expectations. The potential for future halftime shows with similar flair is definitely desired, Pasquale said.
“We would love to continue to push the envelope as often as humanly possible,” he said.
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