Blake Shelton: Friends & Heroes Tour

Blake Shelton's Friends & Heroes Tour ran from February 16th - March 25th with Steve Cohen as the Production Manager.

4Wall provided a massive camera, lighting, rigging and video package for the tour and is currently nominated by the Parnelli Awards for Video Company of The Year due to the incredible work our teams did on this. Read through how everything came together and consider voting for us to reward the hard and effective work of everyone involved.

Mike Campbell from 4Wall was a Crew Chief for the tour and broke down how everything integrated together:

For Blake Shelton’s latest tour, the video and lighting were built as one big connected system, not two separate worlds. The backbone is a convex curved upstage transparent “hero” screen. We stacked lighting behind that screen to punch through the LED, and then hung additional fixtures directly off the bottom edge using custom brackets, so the whole thing reads as a single, layered piece instead of “LED with some lights nearby.”

Downstage, we added nine “banner” screens on a curved truss that mirrors the main screen’s shape. There are four different banner sizes laid out symmetrically across about 60' of curve, with a matching curved truss of lights trimmed just below them. Two off-stage IMAG projection screens round out the layout for clean sightlines.

The banners were the first real puzzle. They mount to the face of the truss but extend both above and below it, and they span that full curved run, so building them quickly and consistently wasn’t simple. We teamed up with TAIT to create custom hooked brackets, standoffs, and dedicated carts the screens lift straight out of. After the first leg, we tweaked the system again to cut down on the number of moves needed to assemble them.

We provided the full camera package: long-lens units at front of house and on house left/right slashes, a handheld on the deck, plus Panasonic UE150s and BGH1s scattered on stage for band shots. Everything hit a 3ME switcher and then our servers, feeding IMAG, the hero screen, and the banners as needed. We built in redundancy wherever we could—disguise gx2c servers, Brompton SX40s/XDs, Barco projectors, and signal paths—so the show stays on its feet even if something in the chain decides it’s had enough.

All of it is triggered from the lighting console, with video cues locked to lighting looks. Timecode is barely used—only to lock lip sync for a single piece of content—so the rig has to be tight enough to feel “live” but solid enough to hit the same marks night after night.