That Gucci shoe box
While we’re finishing to prepare the second part of our exclusive interview to Jamie King to go online this weekend, here’s an interesting excerpt from part one, for the m-tribers who did not check it yet.
MT: You also had a big involvement in the concept of the re-Invention tour stage, we heard stories about how you once went to Madonna’s house holding a box and saying this is my idea…
JK: Oh yeah, how do you know all that stuff my god (laughs).. wow…
Well Madonna calls me “Crazy”, that’s my nickname, because in the promotional tour I wanted her to stage dive so she was like “you’re crazy”, but she did it. I wanted her to do a kiss on the Mtv awards, kiss Britney, kiss Christina, and she was like: What? I said it’s a marriage and at the end of marriage you kiss…
MT: Of course, she was the groom.
JK: But I do show up to her house quite often with crazy materials and I had a Gucci shoe box from one of my assistants and I actually transformed that box into a stage.
I just had this idea of the stage and she had some ideas throughout last year that she had emailed me and I just put them together into that little shoe box.
I’m not a stage designer but each year, each time with Madonna, each incarnation I try to do more because I’m excited to do more and she always pushed me to do more as she always pushes herself to do more and so I designed the stage this last time as well as everything else that went along with it. A hugely consuming job, from setting the song order with Madonna to doing the costumes and all the sections and all the concept as well as designing the stage and constructing and designing and conceptualizing all of the the screen elements that you saw.
MT: Yes, the screens were huge, probably the biggest available at that time I think?
JK: We had them made, custom made, yeah. It was outrageous. And what we had done and what I chose to do has never been done. Actually, it’s very technical, led screens are quite common, people use those but they are obtrusive, kind of blinding and bright, they can be so overpowering and with the size of those screens it would have been too much.
So what I did was to put a skin, like a movie theatre screen, over the leds and what it did was to diffuse led screens and made it look more like a projection rather than a vibrant led, which is very cool.
Click on the image below to read part one of this interesting interview.
