Video control solutions specialist SNP Productions supplied video rental house Creative Technology with two Catalyst v4 PRO media servers with 250 Gb hard drives for the Pet Shop Boys' Pandemonium world tour, for which CT was the video contractor. The Catalysts were housed in one of SNP's Catalyst System flight cases. CT also supplied six Barco 20K HD projectors and all cabling/distro for the tour, which were overlaid to produce one bright image for film projections onto the stage set designed by Es Devlin.
The Pet Shop Boys' live shows are known for visual innovations, with video an integral part of the set design. With input from the band, Devlin commissioned Onedotzero to produce the series of films projected onto two video surfaces, upstage and downstage, that ran for most of the performance.
The whole show was conceived as a movie from start to finish, with the set incorporating a series of fire-proofed white cardboard boxes.
The downstage surface consisted of two walls of 25 boxes, each in a five-by-five format, left and right of center. The upstage surface varied depending on the size of the stage, but in its largest form it was 16 boxes wide by 9 high, with the top broken up by smaller boxes giving an abstract skyline effect.
These provide two constantly changing and contrasting planes and surfaces onto which the films were projected.
SNP's Simon Pugsley spent a week in production rehearsals at Three Mills in London at the start of the tour, loading the video content onto the Catalysts and programming the show with touring projection and Catalyst operator, Robyn Tearle. They also worked very closely with lighting designer Rob Sinclair and Es Devlin to ensure that the video projection and lighting worked seamlessly together.
Video was all synchronized to SMPTE timecode, generated from MD Pete Gleadall's "box of tricks" onstage. Pugsley programmed a series of presets into the Catalyst for each song and a SMPTE synchronized Cuelist was then used to playback each cue.
Synching everything was a challenge, but once it was all set up, running the show became easier; just a matter of pressing "Go" and watching the timecode trigger all the cues. SNP kept in touch throughout the various legs of the tour and provided Catalyst support as needed.
With the two upstage and downstage planes of projection, the projector convergence changed throughout the show.
While the Catalyst could have handled the convergence changes, it was necessary to use a fairly complex setup of Mix Windows to align the video elements on specific parts of the set, so SNP used the "view switching" function on six Barco Image Pro signal processors – one linked to each projector – to swap convergence "on the fly." This was triggered by an RS232 command from the Catalyst cuelist.
The switching is instant and was automatically triggered a few frames before the next cue. The Image Pros converted the HD resolution DVI signal from the Catalyst to HD-SDI which then fed all the projectors. Each Image Pro held two "view" settings, so the images from each of the six projectors could be converged onto either the upstage or downstage projection surfaces.
In November, when the tour returned to the U.K. and Europe, some updates to the programming were necessary to incorporate new songs that had been added to the set.
"Simon has been brilliant – the way he set up the Catalyst covered lots of bases, so when new content was added to the performance as it has progressed, I could very easily integrate it into the show," said crew member Robyn Tearle of SNP's Pugsley.
SNP slightly re-configured the Catalyst rack for this final section of the tour, and also supplied another identical-sized rack to house all the Image Pros and their associated distribution.
SNP Productions has supplied another two Catalyst v4 PRO media servers, complete with Solid State Drives for a tour of Dorian Grey, which CT build in to their own custom system rack.
