Robb Jibson
Principal Designer, So Midwest, Inc.
Robb Jibson is as real as it gets. A product of America’s middle and founder of production design studio So Midwest, he has embraced his roots. Following a teenage stint in a less than successful band, he wound up in community service, turned it into opportunity and ultimately found his path. Encouraged by the Midwest’s friendly ‘can do’ vibe, he has forged a successful career working for bands like Train, Fall Out Boy, Chevelle, Incubus, Weezer, and others.
Meet Robb
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What have you been doing to stay sane/positive since the pandemic hit?
When it initially came upon us, we had just wrapped animating video content and lighting programming for Baby Shark Live! The scenic on that tour is 100% video content and it never stops moving so needless to say we had tunnel vision and were not really paying attention to the outside world. Our team came home from those rehearsals and everything just started locking down. April and May 20’ I really spent all of the time trying to apply for anything that I could to help pay the staff and keep the studio open. As it became evident that it was going to be more than a few weeks [remember 14 days to flatten the curve?] we began really hitting all our clients to see how we could use our expertise in doing shows to, well, do shows. Everyone was in a mad dash to figure out Zoom calls and latency and just trying to keep things going. We are storytellers, we are creators and we used those skills in this new medium!
What types of projects did you work on?
In that time, we have done everything from simple logo animations to virtual conferences, music videos to live streams and chroma backing plates for post work. As May turned to June and June to July we found folks that would allow us to set up some xR technology and start getting demos of that on our reel. In hindsight it really was a fun time, learning at full speed all this bleeding edge technology. Because it is difficult to go to clients and say “hey, we’ve never done this before, but trust us when I say that we can” so we needed to produce some work examples of what we were doing with the tech. We had so much fun learning and creating and as soon as we did we started getting some jobs. Were we doing the premier top 5% shows? No, but we were doing it and making some income to keep folks both employed and occupied! So that was a win!
What have you missed most during all this?
I’m sure it’s been said before, but there is an energy in a large gathering that just isn’t captured by any other medium. Those few moments between “house lights go” and the first flicker of light, the first note or the first image. That. I miss that. The moment in between.
Are you seeing some signs of optimism out there? Anything in the pipeline?
We are. Some of our clients are taking the cautious approach, waiting until 2022, some of our projects have morphed and changed. Some have went away. But I will say that May of 2021 is panning out to be the biggest month for our little firm; we will have 3 simultaneous events happening!
You hail from the Chicago area and your company, cleverly named So Midwest, reflects the area. The Midwest can be quite different from New York or LA. What is most appealing to you about that part of the country?
The balmy winters? You know there is grinder mentality here. It’s known as a blue collar, gritty industrial town. The old timers have a chip on their shoulder about that. I came along after all that happened though. So to me the appeal here is accessibility. The arts scene, the music scene, the culture here is all easily accessible. I love the drive of NYC and its density of talents, LA is the big time. But there are lots of other places too where you can find success in this biz. There is always this unspoken sense that since we are not NYC or LA that our stuff better always be the best stuff we are putting out. And since we are outside of the biggest markets it creates a bond that drives a sense of openness and sharing. That’s the vibe that I love. There is a “can do” work ethic here and I’ve always adored that. There is also a great number of inspirations here; architecture, arts, theatre, sports. I just wish the Chicago Bears would be an inspiration too! But, hey, we just moved up and drafted Justin Fields, the promise of a QB! Hope is here!
What was your youth like and what did you want to be when you grew up?
Humble. I grew up with a mom and a sister and my mom worked really hard to provide for us. We did not have much but we never knew that because she made what we did have feel like it was the absolute best. She surrounded us with things that were free: music, art and culture. My teenage plan was to be a famous guitar player in a huge rock band….
Is that what led you into the world of lighting and design?
Haha. Yup! This was in the tail end of the 80s glam rock era and we sort of decided that in order to be a huge band that we should have a killer look and a show instead of actually, like, practicing and getting good or anything. We were terrible really. But this led to us building these death trap concoctions of car headlights and Christmas tree strings. Except that my car headlamps consistently kept blowing up whenever I would plug them in to the wall and we kept having to “acquire” more from a local junkyard. A little trip through the judicial system after “acquiring” a few too many got me into community service at an old theatre. And when I was doing my “time” scrapping gum wads off the bottom of the plenum grills, I saw some people on stage plugging in lights and they were not blowing up like our 12v car headlamps. I asked them why that was and they explained to me how a series circuit worked and about voltages and something locked into my young, not fully formed brain, but that feeling of understanding it, getting it, made me so intrigued. They offered to teach me things if I kept coming around after the community service assignment and the rest is… now doing an LD spotlight for Elation!
Do you remember when you first thought that lighting might be something for you?
I actually do. I have this very fond memory of seeing a band playing at an outdoor stage setup. There was a par can rig and one of the fixtures must have had Lee 201 in it but that white looked so crisp and so clean to me, I had never really seen anything like it. And I was 14, 15 at the time? I just really latched onto that and decided to try and figure out how that was happening. I went to the library card catalog and found a book, “Essentials of Stage Lighting” by Sellman and Lessley 1st edition. It was full of really old information but I read that thing cover to cover and I was hooked.
Success in this business can often stem from whom you meet, especially early in a career. Is there someone who had a particular influence on your path?
There have been so many folks that have helped me along the way and in many ways. In the 90s I used to read Lighting Dimensions every month and I would latch on to these names of people doing what I wanted to do. People like Peter Morse, Jeff Ravitz, Roy Bennet, Steve Cohen and Abby Rosen Holmes. I would say that Butch Allen is one of my all-time heroes that I actually got to meet; both of his work and his approach on life. Nook Schoenfeld has never been too busy to lend an ear or show a young punk kid like me anything. He is always willing to give advice for whatever point I was at in my path, even today! Bob Peterson has shown us all how to be a gifted artisan and create beautifully with light while being a great human. Recently I spent some time with Patrick Dierson and was honored to learn a little about his approach at how the human and business side of this thing works! Folks like John Bahnick and John Huddleston & Co. were willing to take chances with me and make a crazy idea into reality. There are also programmer heroes of mine that I would study and steal things from! People like Arnold Serame, Andy O’Reilly, Steve Garner and Christian Choi. Some of them I’ve never met, some of them are great friends! I’ve also always looked up to the folks that invented this business, the ones that standardized truck pack dimensions, made dimmer racks, created custom cable systems. They found the efficiencies and created a business for us to work and thrive in! And we all owe them a lot!
You’ve had a successful career designing for rock bands like Chevelle, Deftones, Panic! At the Disco, Incubus, Weezer, Fall Out Boy, and Train, amongst others. Is designing for that genre of music a conscious choice or did one opportunity lead to another?
That was never intentional, but I think it’s from the networking that you do inside of a particular group of managers, agents and production managers. There are other names on that list that may surprise you even, but my arc has always just followed folks that I have relationships with and allow me to help them create!
Are you usually on the road with your own designs or do you hand it over to someone?
I climbed on my first tour bus in 1997 as a lighting tech. In 2004, I boarded a bus for the first time as a Lighting Designer and Operator. In 2010, I decided that I wanted to also handle the visuals on a tour and started down the motion graphics path. In 2018, I decided that to grow the studio that I just couldn’t stay out with one project anymore. As the last project that I was touring with ended I made the choice to be based in the studio. You know it is funny, I probably travel more now? Just less duration. But it’s being able to build and manage a team and get projects handed off to capable operators. That allows us to grow and have many things happening all at once!
When you first approach a design, where do you start?
Depends on the project, duh, but with anything music related always with the music. And I find too that if we are doing something corporate like or experiential, and it does not have an apparent soundtrack, that we will find a way to get a rhythm to it, be it adding some music to animate to, or just to bed in some vibes. But rhythm is the backbone of everything. In an age where most of the stuff our clients are sharing with us are Instagram pics or YouTube videos of other shows we often try to find something unifying to bring it together. It is hard to design when you are looking at someone else’s art and not just be a clone, so we often turn to nature, architecture or other arts. Of course, there is some point when the agent or the production manager is going to come along and say “you’ve got X number of trucks” or “this is routing and we told all the venues it would be X number of stagehands” or “we decided to put Blossom on here just to make your life really hard.” But I like the challenge!
Does the design for a song come to you in a singular vision or does it evolve as you dissect the song?
It really begins with trying to find something that is unique about the song. The beat, the melody. The hook. A strange break down. I always try to layout five or six “hero moments” in a show that I am looking to match with a song. Of course, the songs’ status with the act and the fan base is going to drive some of that but I also look for opportunities to slide in these gimmicks. This is going to be the “all white” song. There is going to be the rest period where we let people forget about all of our tricks and then unleash everything again! There are songs so huge that they don’t need anything else! But it always evolves too. And I’ve learned to embrace that journey!
When in the process of designing does fixture choice enter your head?
I’d say pretty early on! Once we have the routing and the budget and the number of practical things, like number of rigging points, the number of trucks, who is buying the Production Manager the most “pointy knife meals” this month, then we can look at what gear we are going to use! These days everything is pretty close in quality and it’s really the last 5% worth of refinements that is going to make any one product stand out from the others!
When you’re in a creative funk, how do you get the creative juices flowing again?
I try to get outside of the production world a bit. Look at things. Look at buildings, look at nature, look at iconic design principles and find what makes them iconic. Find out how things relate to one another. I find that our designs typically are born of some sort of structure, be it the physical structure of how it’s built to the way that we will structure how the show will unfold. These tales are out there if you listen close enough!
Is there something that defines a Robb Jibson design?
I’d say that its scalability. Our projects are usually playing a variety of venues and I’ve had the pleasure of working with really great Production Managers and Designers that have shown me how to have a variation of the show in every gig. As the touring world became more of a commodity with readily available products and packaging it has become more standardized. So this has gotten somewhat easier to an extent, but you have to consider how scale will look big in the small gig and the big gig. You have to help the client deliver a good presence every night!
For the last few years we have been “light wrapping” a lot of scenic things. I like being able to fill all the negative space with light. Of course, it’s nice to take all of that away and have really focused moments but the foundation of what makes aerial lighting effects great is that it can be used so much in that scale conversation; it can extend, it can breathe and it can be a visual element that does not rely on anything tangible. Our last few years’ worth of designs have included lighting systems that end up buried way in the wings to just create these huge volumes of light. So that. Whatever that is called.
I know you’ve turned to Elation on some past projects. Have you used Elation much in your career?
Elation started out as this brand that I had not heard much about. I remember when Eric [Loader] first started there and the products just kept getting better and better. They took on the “5% challenge” and really refined things like fixture firmware and optics. They are pushing bounds with color systems and are always able to do it at a great price point. And everyone is super nice! They added so many talented folks like John Dunn and Matthias Hinrichs and the products are amazing! This latest batch of large format fixtures really is the best yet!
Is there an Elation light you’d like get your hands on?
That Artiste Mondrian is a bad a** light! I saw it in 2019 and it’s like an LED VL3500 wash FX! Its just light, lens and go baby! I’d love to get a bunch of those in a dark arena and watch them sing! I think they have a hit with that one!
Is there something you’d like to accomplish in this industry that you haven’t already?
TBH where I am now is beyond anywhere that I could have imagined. We have a killer staff of folks that really love creating and that is in the fabric of their being. I’ve been fortunate enough to do big stadium shows and travel in a van with a 3-piece punk band when LD meant “doing lights and drums” in small clubs. Honestly now watching the technology accelerate and giving these folks the opportunity to go create is what I’d like to do more of. I always thought that when I was ready to retire I’d like to go find a small theatre to be the tech person at, just to be able to show the kids the magic of all this stuff. And see that spark in their eye when it just “clicks” for them! I’m not sure I can answer this one because I can’t really even imagine being where we are! Who knows where its going to go!
What do you like to do when you’re not doing lighting?
I like to collect, ride and maintain vintage Italian scooters. Vespas and Lambrettas. It involves pushing them quite a bit as well. But there is a great community and scene around it. And there is just something so special about a 2 stroke engine, its simplicity, its durability. We, in this business, tend to go full send all the time. That 200cc, 8hp engine will max out at 50 mph. Forces you to have a slowed perspective. And that’s great!
What’s something about Robb Jibson that people might find surprising?
That I used to live in a storage unit in between tours and learned that you can make ramen noodles in a coffee pot? You just put the brick thing in there, pour the water in the tank, DON’T add coffee, let it rip and viola, FOOD!
