XL Video's Des Fallon is project manager. He says, "Ivan is highly talented, knows exactly what he wants and his work always looks incredible. It's great to be part of the equation again following last year's Placebo tour."
Morandi wanted the Faithless show to look 'contemporary psychedelic' to match the pumping, dance energy of the band. Onstage are five 10 x 7 ft landscape format screens arranged in two staggered rows, three on the top, two on the bottom, fed by five Barco R12+ projectors. There are two portrait screens at the sides, also fed with R12+s, and although offset, these are designed to be part of the general screen array that widens the stage, taking the show to a larger physical dimension.
The projectors are front projecting onto back projection screen material. This is done for a specific effect - as the screens all have strobes behind them. When the images are projected at 24 frames a second and the strobes are firing at 4Hz, the screen becomes a giant hallucinogenic light-box effect.
The playback material is all custom produced by Morandi in a series of mini-movies which he also directed. He edited and treated this footage first in Premier Pro, compiled and effected it in time to the music using an Arkaos system before finalising it in the Catalyst digital media server, which is also used as the show playback system. This is triggered from his GrandMA lighting console.
XL is supplying three manned Sony DV 21 HDV cameras, and there's a selection of 3-chip Panasonic robotic cameras on pan/tilt heads and tiny Toshiba lipstick cameras dotted all over the stage, attached to instruments and various other objects.
These are all fed back to XL's Jon Shrimpton, located backstage mixing the IMAG on a GV 1200 switcher. The IMAG mix primarily goes to the side screens with occasions forays onto the onstage screens, while Morandi's Catalyst feeds are concentrated on the stage screens, occasionally swapping out to the sides. In some numbers, the images overlap.
XL's crew of five comprises Shrimpton, chief engineer Gerard Cory, Mark Hughes and Darren Montague who are looking after the projection and cameras, and one of XL's camera trainees, Callum Walker.
(Jim Evans)
