There are many articles this month of shows that include creative uses of video. Those, paired with some advice for lighting designers working with video from Contributing Writer and Designer, Craig Rutherford, set me thinking about how creative video for live entertainment has grown and changed over the years. Today, indoors or out, there’s a video product that will allow designers to layer in another element onto the visual canvases or now actually let audiences walk into that visual canvas. And let’s not forget the many LED-based lights that can be pixel mapped with a video signal sent through them. New products, new innovations mean that Production Designers are also able to break out of the (4:3 / 16:9) box; instead, they are presenting new shapes and new ways to present the artist/performer/product beyond I-Mag and trippy content.
Back in June 2009, I stood in a football stadium in Barcelona, Spain and witnessed Willie Williams’ design for U2’s 360° Tour with an accordioning video screen. I was blown away by the scale and scope of what he and Frederic Opsomer had created. This month’s coverage of the video aspects of Coldplay’s current tour including the four massive, inflatable LED spheres shows how far technology paired with a creative imagination has come. Video surfaces that literally inflate in two minutes and load-out in 7 minutes, not to mention cutting 8 trucks to one. That is game-changing in terms of sustainability goals for touring. It is no surprise that like that evening in Barcelona being awed watching a video screen elongate and fold back down mid-performance, that watching an LED covered sphere deflate I am again speaking with Opsomer. His newest innovation is the collaboration on INFiLED’s Titan-X LED panel, which lets designers build higher, safely, than ever before [see page 16 for a Product in Focus on Titan-X].
I am excited to see what will be the next long-remembered design; the next wow technology. Considering the speed of development today, I probably only have to wait a few months!
Michael S. Eddy
Co-Editor of PLSN
