Over the last 10 years, the live entertainment business has been overrun with video panels. We have high res, low res, 6mm to 80mm, cubed-shaped and cylinder shaped — heck, they have video elements that roll up into a truss like your overhead garage door. I like to play with all of it. But the problem I notice is that, no matter how high your screen’s resolution, it never looks as good as a well-projected image.
In the Early Days
Back in the 1990s, it became apparent to concert producers that they needed to have I-Mag screens on the sides of stages. This way the people in the nosebleed section of the arena could still view close-up camera shots of their favorite idols. And they could charge more for these cheap seats. I remember almost 20 years ago when Nocturne Video bought these giant Hughes 6K projectors for a tour. We used them for side screens on a stadium tour. At that time, nobody had ever seen such brightness and quality. The only images ever seen on the screens were camera shots. Boring pictures of some guy’s mug singing. Nobody was playing any media content on them. The wall upstage of the band was meant for scrims and backdrops. We had gobos on white cloth drops and far cyc light fixtures by the truckload for them.
But by the time the millennium rolled around, all that had changed. Everyone wanted an upstage video wall. They wanted 60-foot-long guitars showing every string Van Halen plucked all night. The media server evolution followed, and everyone started making and collecting content.
We pixel-mapped video into moving lights and LED fixtures. We made stages out of LED walls so entertainers could stand in the middle of a river while they played the fiddle. But somewhere along the way, the projector disappeared in the live concert industry. The old Hughes found their way to a dumpster, replaced by 20K+ HD projectors.
Projection is still a huge part of the corporate show market. Price wise, hanging a screen and a couple of projectors is still the easiest, most cost-efficient way to show bar graphs and stills for your business meeting. And it looks better. There is no space between pixels that my eye needs to fill by itself. I know high-definition LED walls look great, but to me, they are still second to a beautifully-projected image.
8mm Projection? Hardly…
In the last few years, I have seen the rebirth of the projector into live music, mainly because designers are doing different things with projectors than before. It’s not all about a white pearly screen to shine on. No sir, this is not your Dad’s world of 8mm projection anymore.
Years ago, I stopped down to see Junior Jacobsen and Breck Haggerty at an arena. These guys were pioneers in our biz, devising ways to control media playback via DMX. Junior designs the show for Tool. I looked up at his rig and noticed a lack of lighting instruments, but I did see a few trusses with big black things hanging down. I asked him what he was doing with this show. “We are painting the decks while illuminating the band with spill and a few assorted lights.”
They had hung a bunch of projectors lens-down from the trusses. Each projector had a quadrant of the stage it lit and, of course, they morphed the images together to make one big picture. When I went up in the stands to watch the effect, I could tell they were doing something new and way cool. If anyone saw the recent Olympics or Super Bowl ceremonies this year, you witnessed just how cool this overhead projection has become since. (See “Hail Madonna,” PLSN, March 2012, page 34).
Landmark Visuals
Projection mapping on buildings has been all the rage for a few years. People have developed programs and clever devices to now use almost any flat surface as a projection screen. Every year they hold the Ultra Music Festival at Bayfront Park in Miami. It’s a giant electronic dance music show with more video elements to dazzle the eye than Disney World.
A production company called SenovvA executed one of the largest projection mapping installations ever. The Red Bull Mind Meld featured projection on the exterior of the Intercontinental Miami Hotel during the performances from dusk until midnight during the three-day festival. SenovvA partnered with Integrated Visions Productions from Brooklyn, NY to create a proprietary display that would elevate both the Red Bull brand and the festival to new heights.
The front face of 29 floors of this building was illuminated to create a centerpiece for the whole festival. Through the use of 12 Barco HD 20 projectors and some custom-built side mounting frames to hold the projectors, they were able to come up with a gorgeous moving mural for a building. They utilized the UVA D3 4U media server system to play back the content — the same system U2 utilized on their last tour. After viewing this spectacle, I can only think SenovvA is starting to seriously tap into the latest technical resources and can step up to any challenge. But topping a 260-foot-tall screen? (You can check it out at plsn.me/Senovva2012).
Head Honcho
That can only be done when we start taking the projection bar to the next level. And trust me when I tell you that Alex Reardon has just upped the ante for everyone involved in this field. Alex has designed the production for Avicii, a high caliber DJ from Sweden who is huge on the electronic dance music circuit. He was asked to design something that could stand out amongst the giant displays of flashing lights and video panels that are so prevalent at these EDM festivals. So he came up with “The Head” (for a closer look, go to www.plsn.me/avicii2012).
Alex had decided that everyone had seen the use of 3D projection mapping on buildings by now. But that was always meant to be viewed straight on. Now, what if you had an audience that surrounded the talent by 180 degrees, and you wanted the whole audience to view the spectacle? Alex had a vision, so he sat down and drew up a three-dimensional, 17-foot tall human head in Maxon Cinema 4D. Then he had the task of figuring out how to bring it to life. Alex was no longer dealing with straightforward geometry; he had a 3D, organic object as the main centerpiece/projection screen. That’s when he approached PRG and content creators Vidaroo. PRG’s scenic department was able to construct the head, while Vidaroo got involved with Reardon to figure out how this could be done.
On top of the 17-foot-tall head, the artist himself is perched. The head itself sits 14 feet from the downstage edge. Hung from a front truss is a set of double-mounted 20K projectors that hit the face straight on. Then on each downstage corner another 20K projector was placed to light the cheeks from the side. Some serious projection mapping was involved in order for the custom content to coincide with Alex’s initial vision. Imagine projecting moving lips on the actual 17-foot-tall heads’ lips. Stunning visual.
Besides the artistic magic of the whole presentation, the way the video and lighting elements were controlled was amazing. Avicii himself triggers all the shows’ cues; MIDI notes activate the media files and lighting cues. He has songs with well over 3,000 lighting cues in them that are synched perfectly, and the artist controls the tempo of the whole presentation. He can actually adjust the speed of all his cues to match the tempo of the beats he is laying down. Programmer Seth Robinson, who’s been referred to as “The Genius” by many designers these days, created the whole MIDI tie-in for this tour.
