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Eleven lasers. Motorized trapezes. A superstar who actually wanted to talk shop.
The Out of This World tour threw everything at Meganne Money.
Technical chaos. Physical danger. The kind of creative pressure that separates hobbyists from professionals.
What she walked away with changed how she thinks about her craft entirely.
When the Entire Rig Becomes Your Enemy
Imagine hanging a precision instrument from a swinging platform and expecting it to behave. That was the reality Meganne Money faced night after night.
The tour’s production design placed laser units on motorized winches suspended from trapezes attached to the grid: the overhead truss structure holding all the lighting, video, and effects equipment. Every time the automated lights shifted positions in unison, vibrations rippled through the entire system. The trapezes swayed. And the lasers swayed with them.
“The trapeze would shake, and there’s a laser suspended from it,” Money explains.
The termination point, where each beam actually lands, sat on the banner area running between seating sections. Every tremor sent that endpoint drifting. Up toward the ceiling. Down toward the crowd.
She spent the entire tour with one hand firing cues and the other hovering over the emergency stop button.
“There were perhaps two shows where I didn’t have to hit the emergency stop at some point due to that movement, to prevent the beam from drifting into the audience.”
Two shows. Out of an entire arena tour.
The Weight of What Lasers Actually Are
Audiences see beams of colored light dancing through fog. They don’t see weapons.
“People assume lasers are simply light,” Money says. “What they don’t realize is that I’m operating a highly dangerous and powerful tool. If I chose to manipulate it a certain way, I could burn through your shirt with ease. I could cause permanent blindness.”
She doesn’t mince words about the stakes. “This is genuinely dangerous equipment, and it demands the same respect as any other pyrotechnic special effect. It can hurt people.”
Meganne Money approaches every show with protocols designed to prevent disaster. Zoning keeps beams ten feet above any standing surface and three feet away from anything within horizontal reach. E-stop buttons provide instant shutdown capability. But when equipment hangs from moving platforms, even perfect preparation meets unpredictable physics.
The Missy Elliott tour demanded hypervigilance. One miscalculation, one delayed reaction, one moment of distraction, and a beam could drift into paying customers. Equipment damage adds another dimension to the risk. “It could be very expensive, very quickly if you accidentally hit a row of $100,000 projectors,” she notes.
A Superstar Who Actually Showed Up
A-list artists rarely engage directly with technical crew. The hierarchy of massive productions typically keeps performers insulated from the people making their visions reality. Meganne Money expected the same distance on the Out of This World tour.
She got the opposite.
“She demonstrated far more personal involvement than I would have anticipated from someone at her level,” Money recalls. “Typically, I would never interact directly with an A-list artist. Not even exchange a single word throughout an entire tour.”
Missy Elliott broke that pattern. She called Money into her dressing room, pulled up videos on her phone, pointed to effects she’d seen at other concerts.
The specific request turned out to be a static line effect. Money delivered it in two minutes. But the interaction itself mattered more than the technical ask. Here was one of hip-hop’s most influential artists treating her laser programmer as a creative collaborator, not an interchangeable technician.
That level of engagement changes how you approach the work. When the artist cares about details, everyone’s game elevates.
What Danger Teaches You About Precision
Most tours let Meganne Money settle into rhythm. Build the rig. Program the cues. Run the show. Trust the equipment.
The Missy Elliott production never allowed that comfort. The swinging trapezes meant constant threat assessment. Every song required split attention between creative execution and safety monitoring. The margin between spectacular effect and potential catastrophe measured in inches and fractions of seconds.
That kind of pressure builds specific skills. You learn to read equipment behavior, anticipating problems before they materialize. You develop reflexes for emergency response. You internalize the reality that no visual effect, however stunning, justifies risking someone’s eyesight.
Meganne Money emerged from the tour with reinforced understanding of why safety protocols exist and why they can never be treated as optional.
Working a tour where she needed her hand on that button for nearly every show crystallized why those protocols exist. They’re not bureaucratic checkboxes. They’re the architecture that lets spectacular things happen without spectacular consequences.
The Out of This World tour gave Meganne Money incredible visuals, direct collaboration with a legend, and 11 laser units pushed to their limits. It also gave her something harder to quantify: proof that she could maintain absolute safety standards while everything around her moved, shook, and threatened to drift into disaster.
That knowledge travels with her to every show since.