BIRMINGHAM, U.K. – The Editors have included Green Hippo's new VideoMapper component on their recent tour, In This Light and On This Evening. Lighting company Siyan supplied all the lighting for the show. Lighting designer Cate Carter, who has previously worked on tours for Duffy and Elbow, and video designer Paul "Pablo" Beckett, specified two HippoCritters for the outing.
The design brief for the tour was to create something, dark, edgy, sinister and theatrical, and as the design team began to understand more about the band's vision for the live shows, they settled on the concept of industrial and urban decay as a basis for the set design and visual content.
The designers said that while the band wanted video as a part of their live show, they did not want the stage to be dominated by a video screen, or to feature too many literal images.
Carter and Beckett used four 2-meter-square "picture frames" fabricated from printed Foamex borders and fabric fronts by Hangman. The "picture frames" housed screens that hang inside them, partially obscured by a layer of printed gauze, giving a sense of 3D depth behind the band.
Carter and Beckett chose Stealth by Element Labs, supplied by XL Video, for the screens themselves, after testing alternatives for the right combination of lightness in weight and resolution suitable for both large and small venues.
Beckett created the custom content, which ranged from edgy, uncomfortable abstractions to brighter imagery using primary colors for encore songs such as "Papillion."
Beckett also fed four bullet cameras into a CCTV quad split device, and Carter was able to use preset effects paletted to her Avolite Diamond 4 Elite console to select any or all inputs.
VideoMapper allowed her to display these on any, all or a selection of her four Element Labs Stealth screens hung across the back of the stage once the images were fed into the HippoCritter's capture card, enhancing the modularity of the rig.
For more information, please visit www.green-hippo.com.
