Mumford & Sons
UK - For four years Alex Leinster and his team of video technicians have installed and managed a thousand square metres of LED screen and camera package for AEG's highly regarded Barclaycard presents British Summer Time Hyde Park concert season.

The equipment supplied by Video Design has been slightly expanded this year, "We've added a 1.1m-wide vertical wrap around strip to the stage left wing to improve the view from the VIP area," explained Leinster. This well-reasoned attention to detail illuminates the bigger question, what do performers actually do with this generous expanse of video screen?

"The band are very energetic and rock their show, but they are not really a video band in the sense that on tour they don't have a scrap of LED on stage." Such was the conundrum outlined by Steve Price, video director for Mumford & Sons, one of the half dozen acts that headlined this event over the two weekends.

"Normally I'm working with cutting to a 16:9 format for IMAG screens each side of stage," he continued. "Obviously with the way the stage is designed for Hyde Park, with LED floor to roof and wing to wing, you are performing within a sort of giant LED cove, so we had to design a show for the screens." Leinster at Video Design had already established a procedure to ease this process, "we share our D3 Visualiser with all performers," he said.

"I spoke to Alex and Producer Richard Shipman at Video Design and they were really helpful. They said to me 'once you know what you want we can map it and set it to time code as you need.' What was really good was they put me in touch with Nils Porrnan, a D3 programmer. He already knew the screen layout having worked on the Kylie show at Hyde Park last year.

"Most of what we used was live footage shot with an arsenal of robocams we brought in specifically to create subtle, live backgrounds, often in monochrome. When we needed pre-rendered content we used some slow motion video taken from live shows on tour as well as some drone footage of rocky landscapes and sunsets. Voyeuristic in some sense, for example something shot from a backstage camera, maybe a close-up on a flight case with little depth of field simply revealing a blurred band performing in the background; that's quite meaningful.

"Played in black & white and in huge scale it was immediately a strong visual background. The band loved it, and the audience loved it. This was a completely new show for Mumford yet when Video Design came to us and said 'we have the kit, you'll have a show', they were right. They made it that easy."

(Jim Evans)


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