SYDNEY – Kylie Minogue’s 15th tour, in support of her 14th album, Golden, wraps up with a series of seven shows in her native Australia next month after a run of 26 shows in Europe last fall. The show makes use of an enormous LED video screen upstage with content from Tom Colbourne of Blink. Colbourne noted how disguise 4x4pro media servers and Notch VFX play a key role in the overall show design.
More details from disguise (www.disguise.one):
The tour, with a total of 33 dates in Europe and Australia, launched last September in the UK and Europe.
The retro look of the show featured a G-shaped stage and glittering golden runway with an enormous LED video screen upstage. “Kylie and Rob’s concept for the tour set the entire show in the 1970’s as an abstract road movie which played out on stage and screen,” says Tom Colbourne, President with Blink. Blink created all the show’s screen content shooting live action footage in the California desert and a London studio following the narrative that linked the music, screen content and choreography.
“The content was presented on a panoramic 4800 x 1120 pixel LED video canvas, including a central portion that was 2400 x 1120 primarily for cinematic content and portrait side screens for IMAG. We also had the option to run content across the entire expanse of screens, which we did during the section intros” Tom explains.
The show featured six distinct sections each with a different setting and style. It opened with Kylie waking up in the middle of the desert and ended with her dancing in Nashville. “Despite forcing ourselves to use mainly filmed content rather than graphics, the whole show was incredibly tightly programmed with a live feed, screen content and lighting refined exhaustively during production rehearsals at Fly By Night,” notes Tom.
“The live feed was even more important than usual on this show as the screens needed to not just relay the show but also help convey the story,” he says. “Multicam Director Blue Leach did an amazingly creative job collaborating with Rob and Disguise Programmer, Nev Bull using Notch to cleverly format the feed and help reinforce the ‘70s theme with appropriate filters and effects.”
Tom points out that the disguise solution, was critical to the complex production. “Being able to flip between different formatting presets across the screen canvas on disguise was vital to programming and rehearsing– and getting the flexibility we needed from the canvas.”
disguise’s tight Notch integration was a key element throughout the show. “All IMAG was treated with Notch,” says Nev Bull, Project Engineer with Creative Technology Ltd. who served as the disguise Programmer for the tour.
“We needed to make sure that Kylie looked her best on the screens at all times and used Notch for some slight skin smoothing as well as more creative VFX,” points out Creative Director Rob Sinclair, who designed and directed the show with Kylie. He calls the disguise systems “reliable, powerful, quick and with low latency. disguise was our only choice.”
Credits:
Show Conceived And Directed By : KYLIE MINOGUE AND ROB SINCLAIR
Production and Lighting Designer: ROB SINCLAIR
Video Content Producer: TOM COLBOURNE
Screens Camera Director: BLUE LEACH
Disguise Programmer: NEV BULL
Tour Production: PULL THE PIN OUT
Screen content: BLINK
Content Producer: KIRSTEN MCFIE
Lead Editor: RUPA RATHOD
Content Technical DirectorRICHARD CULLEN
