Coliseum Amphitheater

The Statue of Liberty version we built here has a concert control tower hidden inside the head and crown; it’s not for air traffic, but for all the special effects of the stage and seating area below.

 

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Table of Contents:

1. Intro
2. Vocabulary
3. Dimensions & Layout
4. Special Features
5. Bands Performing Here
6. Novels Excerpt
7. Overall & Layout (Images Begin)
8. Conceptual
9. Terraces Appearance
10. Performers and Fans
11. 2023 Update:  2022 Scale-model in Minecraft

 

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Intro:

This open-air seating area is modeled after the Colosseum of Rome; elliptical, multiple stories all connected by cascading rows of seats, and big enough to seat many thousands.  Unlike the Colosseum, though, this amphitheater does not have encircling walls, and is not elliptical all the way around.  Instead, it narrows toward the stage, eventually appearing to stretch forward to touch that stage, at which point you have the orchestra pit, giant speaker towers, curtains scaffolding, and light-show devices… with the base of a group of towering statues beginning in its farthest background.

Since concerts here only last a couple hours, guests bring their own drinks and snacks.

 

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Vocabulary:

 

So an amphitheater is the basic/regular sometimes-open kind of round performance-area, and the coliseum is the bigger kind.

The standard spelling for an outdoor stadium is “coliseum”, but the one in Rome is called the “Colosseum.”
Also note that the name of the specific construction in Rome is capitalized.

We call ours both coliseum and amphitheater, almost a hyphenated term, because it is somewhere between those two types/sizes of this kind of venue.

 

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Dimensions & Layout:

The seating area of this amphitheater slowly slopes down from the beach behind it… all the way to the foot of the stage.  At its back and outermost rows, it is widest; nearly half a mile across, though the curve of these rows increases their length much more than that.  As one approaches the foot of the stage, the rows of seats narrow to 924 feet across.

The orchestra pit separates the front row of seats from the stage, and is about 60 feet from front (the edge of that front row of seats) to back (where the stage rises up and begins), and measures 792 feet across; room for a full symphony of instruments and their players.  This orchestra pit is a full story down below the front row of the audience seating area.

Next is the stage, and it is a few feet above that front row. The stage measures 792 feet across, like the orchestra pit, and 330 feet from front to back. At the back of this stage is the area for the bases of the towering statues, and that area is also 792 feet across, and measures 462 feet from front to back.

That same seating area of this amphitheater has 120 rows from front to back.  Each row is 10 feet from front to back, and instead of chairs, there are silk and vicuna covered mattresses, love-seat recliners, and studded leather chair-and-a-halfs.  The back row is on level with the beach, and each successive row is a bit lower than its predecessor, resulting in the front row being 120 feet (12 stories) below the beach (ground level).​​  This helps keep the (sometimes) loud music amplified only for and toward the audience, deflecting the rest of it up and out into the Inisfreean sky.

The mountains, greenbelt, and other attractions that neighbor this amphitheater help to cancel out a lot of that escaping sound, too.  The depth of this stage also means that its towering statues, each standing 15 stories tall, still have only their heads visible as rising just above ground level; their busts (head to shoulders) are their three stories which are visible to those behind them, with their whole bodies being visible only to the audience in front of them.

When fully occupied, this amphitheater’s seating area can comfortably fit ​close to 100,000 human-sized people; that’s on par with the biggest football (soccer) stadiums from around the world, and is a greater capacity than almost all of the American football stadiums.  If the chairs and spacing of those Outlands stadiums had been used instead of love-seats and beds, this amphitheater would actually dwarf those stadiums in terms of seating capacity; it would be able to seat about half a million people.

To the left of the stage, as the audience faces it, stands the quarter-of-a-mile tall, conical, flat-topped volcano called Dante Peak.​  To the right of the stage, as the audience faces it, the flying roller-coaster train from Inisfree’s theme-park routinely makes its rapid barrel-roll approach, flying right past the side of the towering statues standing tall at the back of this stage, over the audience, and out above Inisfree’s main lake on its soaring loop into the city’s mile-deep canyon and beyond.

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2023 September upgrade:  400 10-stall (5 stalls per side) toilet-rooms are built into the 2 side-walls/-cliffs; there are 200 of them per side, arranged/spaced evenly all the way down from the top terrace to the lowest one nearest the stage.
(100,000 guests / 25 = 4,000 portajohns needed, but we are using 10-stall toilet-rooms here; 400 needed)

 

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Special Features:

Overlooking this amphitheater is a group of versions of the Statue of Liberty.
Like the version that is used as Inisfree’s school building, these statues have been heavily modified to be much more attractive and life-like than the Statue of Liberty that once stood on the coast of New York.
Unlike our main school building, these statues are male and clothed; they are the likenesses of the band members of the original Violent Rebirth heavy metal music group. They are as follow:

The “Concert Control” room is in the head of the Auz statue, and each of the other three statues have VIP “boxes” in their heads, looking down through their eyes on the stage and terraces below.

 

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Bands Performing Here:
(all cover-bands; all-ICVs, unless at least the lead singer got approved during pre-screening)

• Avril Lavigne
• Belanova
• Dazzler
• Digital Daggers
• Evanescence
• Fireflight
• Inna
• Iron Maiden
• Lacuna Coil
• Lights
• Paramore
• Radoslava
• Sevendust
• Shakira
• t.A.T.u.
• The Pretty Reckless
• Violent Rebirth II – performing the Auz’s Iraq concert, and Brian McKnight covers
• Violent Rebirth III
• Zara Larsson

 

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Novels Excerpt:

It was so easy to lose track of time in his city; everyone was having fun these days, and time flowed a little differently there, moving like a positive whirlwind with them all. Weeks could seem like days, as their energy remained so high and complete, and everything still got done. Those who were new to this realm would find with an air of relief that no matter how much time slipped by, …what they really wanted was bound to happen, and happen in the best of ways.

About 91,000 visitors and new residents were in Inisfree each month, and at any given time this year. ~9,000 of them were males, and ~82,000 female. Spread out over the big city’s 100 square miles of surface terrain and neighborhoods, this made the place still feel virgin and brand new, like a pioneer town, still with that small-town charm. Faith would only encounter, at most, a hundred people out and about in each neighborhood or other section of the city she passed through on her search for its maker.

There were actually a lot more people in Inisfree than that, including many millions of the Inisfreean girls; human-looking ‘drones’ who maintained the whole creation very gracefully and efficiently from deep within. They kept out of sight, though, except when wanted or needed, giving everyone ample chance to settle in on their own, roam around, and figure things out without much help. Knowing what Faith was up to, they’d decided to let her urges alone guide her through the first levels and revelations of their realm; she’d experience and bond with so much more that way.

The man Faith was looking for was spending much of his time in these first several pre-global-cleanup years working closely with his Inisfreean people on adding more luxurious finishing-touches to each home and other building across their city. Furniture, light fixtures, art, and even custom vehicles were being 3D-printed, transported, and placed by them, all based on his instincts and searches, paired with their computer-assisted design mastery. Auz’s busy daily routine, from workdays to weekends, still fit a steady pattern that allowed newcomers and residents to eventually link back up with him.

Rise, work, exercise, play, relax; that was his five-part day each day. He spent about three hours on each, making for a 16-hour waking period when an hour for lunch was added in. It was about half and half, work and errands, business and personal (though everything felt like ‘personal’ and fun for him, these days). While few outside his inner circle would ever find him in his private estate high on the side of Inisfree’s central mountain, people still had a good chance of noticing him from noon to 9 PM; those were the times after he had left his new home, wrapped things up at his offices downtown, and started mingling again for lunch, fitness warm-ups, a little sport and time on the lake, dinner, more jam sessions and hangouts with his two bands (almost always making their way from the hidden place where they practiced… to one or more of their city’s clubs), and, if not also a movie, out in any of a hundred perfect places they’d set up for stargazing.

Faith would find him on the Friday following her arrival in Inisfree; 11 October 2019, which always fell on Odin’s-day, 4 Thor in Inisfree, was the day the Inisfreeans and many of their guests celebrated, of the many, many things they had special days for throughout their year, cookbooks. Auz and Ambi had enjoyed a week of days and nights together, sampling various culinary masterpieces at the now-many kitchens, cook-offs, and restaurants across their realm, always falling asleep tangled up close together smiling, magnetically drawn back together every time. Now that they’d reconnected this month, he felt recharged and balanced enough to return to his eternal life’s work.

Where does a music lover go on a Friday night in Inisfree? To one of its more than 50 venues for beautiful noise and fun, of course! Ambi’s guest was eventually asked if she was going to be at the concert of the king that evening, letting Faith know she could find the man she wanted… performing live at the coliseum amphitheater from 8 to 9 PM.

When Faith arrived, she’d find it was backed by a jaw-dropping set of giant band-member likenesses whose masonry made the sculpture appear like the faces of Mount Rushmore, or multiple Statues of Liberty, one of them with feathery angelic wings, each with its own giant stone instrument. These were the memorials to his original band’s members from long ago. Each stood 15 stories tall, with triumphant posture and their instruments held high.

Another band had already started off the night there by opening with a few songs, and those in attendance were spread out across concentric horizontally-curved terraces that fanned out and up from the lowest one near the stage. There were no seats or standing-room-only areas, though; picnic-blankets and other wide surfaces for lounging had been laid out, each with plenty of walking space beside and behind it. A dull ‘roar’ of all the people talking in normal tones filled the air.

Walking out on stage with his band was all it took; half the city had gathered there to rock and sing with them, and all 50,000 of them cheered, tore their own shirts off, and threw them in the air. It took a while for that excitement to settle back down, and when it did he just stirred it up again, steadily raising his voice from a whisper to a yell for them, “In-iiis-freeeEEE, MAKE SOME NOIIIIISE!!!” Their combined voices became deafening. People were already getting chills, and the show hadn’t even begun.

An eclectic man who liked his variety, Auz started off the night of rock with their cover of Sevendust’s “Live Again”, which he sang brilliantly and passionately over the edge of the stage to a crowd numbering in the thousands. Hands and arms reached out and up for him, and he took his time reaching out to hold as many as he could. His otherwise all-female band worked their instruments masterfully; a blonde backing his vocals up with her own, a redhead on the electric guitar, a brunette on the drums, and one with jet-black hair fingering a mobile keyboard hanging by a matching black strap around the back of her neck.

Colorful lights brightened elliptical and shifting areas along the amphitheater’s two cliff-like walls, moving and changing well with each portion of the music, flashing brighter for the more intense parts. They were using their understanding of chromotherapy for the benefit of themselves and the audience; this light-show was far more than just generic special effects for a concert. It would go on for the entire show, adjusted artistically to every theme of the songs and intervals between.

Song after song, they changed not only bands and notes, but genres, performing Digital Daggers’ alternative-indie-electronica song “Come Crashing” next, for which his blonde band member took over the lead vocals, and he stood facing her, both their sides to the whole amphitheater; so everyone could see them looking right at each other for the whole song, charging everyone and themselves up for a wild ride. A spidery eruption of lightning in the clouds high overhead illuminated the whole area for a second or two, vanishing in a returning darkness that re-exposed the aurora even higher.

Punk-rock this time meant “You Gave Me a Promise” by Firelight. It was another one sung by the girls in his band. The lights along the front of the stage went vertical and flashed many times, sending pillars of pure white straight up into the night. The blonde and redhead walked around their sides of the front of the stage, kneeling to get closer to the fans, and singing directly to them, one or two at a time.

Holding the mic to his growing grin, he knew many of his friends out in front of the stage would know just what he meant by this hint: “Hey, everyone, …would you go with me?” The first fans to get it led the rest in a spreading cheer.

Josh Turner’s “Would You Go With Me” country hit was next. The skies overhead were clear and calm for this one. Behind them, the tall statues of the former band members were lit up like a Midwest Summer sunrise. An amber sunset color scheme dimming into deep oranges and reds would, a few minutes into the song, follow.

There was a hush that fell over the crowd in the moments that followed the final notes and applause for that last song; something had changed in the air, and the mood was tangibly different. Auz stood with feet shoulder-width apart up on that stage, his head lowering, eyes down, mic in hand, and then his eyes alone moved up to look right out over the crowd. They were so dark and piercing, as if he’d been possessed. Lips millimeters from the mic, he rumbled in a low and hypnotic voice, “And yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of Death, …I will fear no evil, …for I’m the baddest motherfucker in the valley.” War-cries erupted all around Faith, both the men and the women on all sides of her raising their fists into the air, going wild.

“Twilight of the Thunder God” by Amon Amarth electrified that crowd after a chilling 14-second intro. Somehow, the Inisfreeans had learned how to manipulate the weather; the sky overhead became more overcast, with lightning and thunder timed exactly as they had been in the original song. Synchronized head-banging and hair-spinning followed suit.

Volume levels rose during that metal track to the point where everyone could feel the song resonating in their bones. The double-bass was intense as ever. A lot of people lost control and started rapidly stomping their heels, playing air-guitar, or hair-spinning right along with the band up ahead. Mosh-pitters formed a spinning circle of fellow metal-lovers up in front, throwing elbows and knees, knocking each other down and helping the fallen back up just as quickly.

The crowd needed a breather after that spirited last one. Auz gave it to them with about a minute of setting up for what was to come. It would be a total ‘change of gears’, to be sure, and he was already smiling about it, keeping the surprise to himself as he stood in a huddle with his band members, chatting about something away from their mics so the crowd couldn’t hear.

Walking back to their mics, Auz then told the audience, “One of the very first moments my band during the military and our first deployment had… was getting together in a dark concrete room of a base we had taken over,” he looked to the blonde on stage several feet off to his right side, and she looked to him, smiling brightly, picturing the memory he had, “and somehow making it seem very bright, all of us choosing to come together in song… with our spontaneous rendition of Chariots of Fire.” Many hearing him began to smile, some chuckling a bit, now also picturing the event, so unlikely for a band of rough and furious young warriors isolated in condemned bunkers, underpaid and used as bait on the other side of the planet. He cracked a smile, too, almost laughing with them, then quickly added, “Here’s another quartet favorite I’d love to share with all of you.” The band’s snapping began.

Barbershop quartet was another genre they were apparently very into and good at. Auz led his band in a finger-snapping oldies cover of Billy Joel’s “For the Longest Time”. They stood mostly in place as they sang it, harmonizing so well, only moving their feet side to side, one at a time, out and back, just like in the oldies.

That pause between songs was back. Auz stood on stage, waiting for everyone to sense what it was time for, …and listen. He brought the mic up to his lips… and waited a moment, eyes down, as if in deep thought, a slight frown on his brow. “…If you close your eyes… what does it feel like?”

“Pompeii” by Bastille was covered second-last, and it carried with it a great message very fitting for their year and times. Auz’s voice kept matching the original songs’ singers. There were no vocal signatures and accents he couldn’t do.

At the end of it, he raised the mic back up and joked for the crowd, “We’ll try to stick to just one genre next time. Sorry, guys. I’m not very good at doing only one thing.” There were plenty of laughs and a few whistles of support. It was true and everyone there knew it; he sampled the entire world, and liked to share the best of what he’d found from a thousand different fields. He would probably be mixing it up like in this concert for the rest of his life. The ‘roller-coaster’ times had only made him that much more interested in it all; he’d learn to ride the waves of life, surfing and celebrating while some other people had chosen to plant themselves or fall.

A very soulful “Last Dance”, originally composed by Brian McKnight, smoothly brought their evening into a very seductive night, just the way every night was, and was meant to be, in Inisfree. Auz had transformed into a slowly swaying R&B singer. His voice carried all the way to the back and top of the amphitheater, leaving so many of them in another wave of pleasant chills, star-struck and spellbound. No one dared make a sound, only a few mouthing out the words, carefully maintaining the silence for his voice and mood to fill.

Spotting Faith in the crowd, Auz smiled to her from his center-point up on stage. After the applause for his band, and all of them holding hands in a line and bowing in thanks to their fans together, the lights turned to fully illuminate the statues of his original band back and towering behind them, and he hopped right off the front of the stage, landing well, and rose to walk straight to his new admirer, welcoming her with a hug in front of everyone. “You look… wow!” he checked her out, then looked into her eyes, awaiting her next move.

Inisfreean policewomen in their brief sky-blue uniforms were already skillfully keeping everyone around them blissfully distracted and migrating up the terraces and back out on the beach where all their rides were waiting. The blue-and-white painted, Inisfreean police cars; their version of the Tumbler vehicle from Batman Begins, were out amongst all those other parked and arriving vehicles, their light-bars of bright LEDs on, alternating like the Inisfreean eyes and hair did; they were not just red, white, and blue, like the police lights in America, but all six main colors of the rainbow. One of them blew a kiss to Auz, sending him her love before returning her attention to another audience member asking for directions. The policewoman beamed a genuine smile to the person, taking them by the hand as if they were best friends, and walked with them up to the beach to help them find their way; Inisfreean police had a completely different and upbeat mentality compared to their counterparts abroad.

His band members were already almost done packing things up on stage, thanks to a couple dozen roadies and groupies who had joined them. All four of them would be jumping down from the edge of the stage to walk up to welcome Faith, too; she was about to meet the band.

 

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Overall & Layout:

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Conceptual:

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Terraces Appearance:

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Performers and Fans:

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2023 Update:  2022 Scale-model in Minecraft

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