AD X Media Group, Cirque du Soleil Combine Live Performance with “3D” Projection
In July, AD X Media Group, a multi- and mixed-media company specializing in large format 3D projection, collaborated with Cirque du Soleil on a visual extravaganza for the opening night of the big convention in San Diego for comic books, Comic-Con.AD X Media’s 3D video mapping, a careful balance of digital manipulation, lighting, and fixed perspective, can dazzle the eye and perplex the mind. They’ve imprinted gigantic hands onto defenseless municipal buildings, caused casinos to crumble then miraculously reappear, and shattered humongous convention centers like sheets of glass, all through the sharp and colorful detail of 3D projection.
These spectacular optical illusions convinced Cirque du Soleil, world-famous for their theatrical acrobatics, that AD X Media was the perfect company to help them present a special one-time performance of the gravity-defying battle scene from their show, KÀ. But there was a catch. Cirque intended to stage the climactic battle scene on a vertical, 90-foot outer wall of San Diego’s Petco Park stadium complex, while integrating live performers and video projections.
Projecting a scene from KÀ onto an existing structure was an idea that had been suggested for years by members of the Cirque creative team, but, perhaps, there was a reason it was never put into practice. An outdoor performance involving both live and virtual acrobats, large-scale 3D video projection, proper lighting and an animated storyboard introduction appeared great on paper, but it had scarcely been attempted by Cirque, or anyone else for that matter.
“The Comic-Con performance was in development for over a year,” says Jeff Lovari, publicist for Cirque du Soleil. “The concept had been around for a while before we attempted it.”
“The Cirque guys were crazy about breaking new ground, and we are the same way,” adds Gary Evans, president of AD X Media Group. “We thought the idea was great, but how do we do it?”
No 3D Glasses Required
As the AD X Media and Cirque team would soon discover, the answer to “How do you do it?” was not arrived at very easily. Initially, the premise was to create a stunning visual experience that would require audience members to don 3D glasses. To do this, the actual battle scene sequence from the show needed to be filmed at the MGM Grand Hotel & Casino in the KÀ Theater. (In essence, the video projection used for the Comic-Con event would be a replication of a filmed performance.)
A total of 11 performers were involved in the Comic-Con act, but only nine acrobats, who skimmed and twirled above KÀ Theater’s 50-by-25-foot hydraulic stage, were actually filmed for video playback. “The other two performers were not filmed because they would, of course, appear in-person at the Comic-Con event, intermingling with the virtual performers,” says Lovari.
But as the 3D video filming and playback process unfolded, it became apparent that the Comic-Con attendees would not receive the visual effect Cirque and AD X Media had intended. “We realized that you had to be straight on looking at the wall in order to get the 3D effect using glasses,” says Evans.
“With 3D, the further away you are, the images tend to flatten out,” says Keith Wright, operations production manager for KÀ. “The projected images we finally ended up using created a kind of three-dimensionality to the performance. The 3D elements were achieved through the interactive elements captured by the filmed performance and the actual live acrobats springing off the wall and out at the audience members.”
Scaling the Wall
Outside the walls of Petco Park, approximately 430 feet from the stadium’s outer confines and nearly 12 feet off the ground, four Barco 1080 FLM HD 20K projectors were positioned to emit 80,000 lumens onto a 50 by 25 foot white projection screen. Installed on the day of the event, the screen was, in fact, 3M 1080 Scotch print film adhesive, one of the few materials that administrators of Petco Park would authorize for the Comic-Con performance.
No pre-visualization software programs were used to map the wall, and no additional media servers were utilized on the day of the performance. The Petco Park screen’s dimensions exactly matched those of the hydraulic stage in the MGM Grand. “There’s an inherent program in the projectors we use,” says Evans. “And since the wall was basically flat, we didn’t need an elaborate server on the day of the performance.”
A Luminys Lightning Strikes 70K fixture, for the explosive flashes that occur at the battle scene’s finale, was placed on the ground, nearly 40 feet from the wall, facing up via the lighting instrument’s yoke. To light the two live performers — and avoid casting shadows — the crew used a minimal amount of uplighting from 12 ETC Source 4 19° 750W Lekos placed on the ground. Four of them were on floor stands and eight were hung from 10-foot light trees (four positioned at stage left and four at stage right), at four-foot and eight-foot elevations.
“[The lights] were cut about two feet off the deck, so that they didn’t wash out the projected image, yet, the performers were still in full light,” says Wright. “Though most of the color and contrast was actually coming from the projections out front, six of the Source 4s were red because, at one point in the battle scene, [the background] switches to red.”
Comic KÀ
Comic-Con and Cirque du Soleil may seem like strange bedfellows, but there was a method to this crossover madness. “We were very much looking at the demographics of the people who come to see KÀ,” says Lovari. “It seemed to match the attendees of Comic-Con. Also, there’s a narrative, a storyline, in KÀ. The show has an Asian influence, with touches on Anime. We thought that, with everything considered, it made sense to introduce KÀ to a group of people who may not necessarily be familiar with the show or what we do.”
Prior to the live performance, a countdown clock was started, drawing a crowd from the San Diego Convention Center to Petco Park just across the street. With thousands in attendance, the performance was kicked off by an animated video illustrating KÀ’s basic plot. It was designed in a comic-book style format, which illuminated the vertical screen and a portion of the bare wall, due to bleed.
At the end of the segment, a hellish 3D fireball is expelled from the comic-book pages. In split-seconds of darkness, before the start of the performance, two live acrobats, suspended from a pulley and cabling system secured to a freestanding box truss located on the roof of the Petco Park outer wall, assumed their battle stations — a 90° position relative to the projection screen. Through joystick-operated wireless remote control, the two performers choreographed their own breathtaking movements.
The animated heroes and villains featured in the short were created from still photos of KÀ’s live performers, who were in full makeup at the time their publicity stills were snapped. “Through our artistic graphics team, we were able to draw these characters and insert them into our software where it is reconfigured,” says Evans.
Evans wouldn’t reveal any trade secrets, but he did say that, even from the earliest stages of this project, he and his team spent untold hours perfecting AD X Media’s 3D effects. “We have a mixture of certain software that allows us to create an image through projectors on large-scale buildings,” Evans says.
“AD X Media understands how to fool the eye,” says Wright. “The perfect example is comic book opening, which shows a boat rocking on the waves. Because of color contrast, you are forced to perceive a kind of depth. The tips of the waves are a lot brighter and a lot more noticeable than everything else onscreen. They did a fantastic job.”
Replication and Transmutation
In order to present a 3D projection at Comic-Con in San Diego, a KÀ performance, in Las Vegas, needed to be filmed with a basic stereoscopic approach. “We built a six-foot high platform in the audience area, about a third of the way back from the stage, and placed a pair of 3D cameras, side by side, on this platform,” says Wright.
However, due to the constraints of stereoscopic photography playback, the video projection operated in 2D, rendering the Comic-Con crowd’s need for 3D glasses unnecessary. “We ended up using the left-eye image of the equation, only, to project onto the screen at Comic-Con,” says Wright. “But because we filmed in 4K resolution, the image was still flat-out amazing.”
KÀ performers spent four months executing and mastering their routine in preparation for the Comic-Con event. Regular performances of the battle scene in Las Vegas require the hydraulic stage in KÀ Theater to be set at a 100° angle. For the filmed performance, however, the stage was kept at a static 90° angle, mirroring the vertical surface of Petco Park’s wall.
In addition, touch-sensitive tracking technology, designed by Holger Förterer for Cirque, is employed for live performances of KÀ in Las Vegas, but no interactive systems were used at Comic-Con. “The interactive images you would have seen, the water ripples on the video projection, for instance, were created during the filmed performance and then displayed on playback,” says Wright.
Despite some minor drawbacks, through video projection, well-placed lighting and a trusted rigging system, Cirque and AD X Media achieved the near impossible: they replicated the rousing final battle scene of KÀ in a 90° vertical reality — ripples and all. “After kicking this idea around philosophically,” says Lovari, “I think everything came together at Comic-Con in terms of tapping existing technology, choosing the right venue and the appealing to the demographics of the attendees.”
