Faith has been said to move mountains, but you don't see much tangible evidence of it in everyday life. Yet right now, in a stadium somewhere, U2's faith (in themselves and their audiences, not to mention their road crew) is moving a small mountain of high-tech equipment: a 40' (12m) mirror ball lemon/vehicle, a 100'-tall (30m) olive on an orange cocktail stick, and a 100' (30m) yellow arch topped by a single huge PA cluster that's been dubbed "The Great Pumpkin" for its Day-Glo(R) hue. Backing up all of that is the world's largest and most remarkable video screen. The first of its kind, the screen contains about one million blue LED modules, and it cost the band about $6 million to develop.

Not many bands would have financed a structure that no one could guarantee would work. But then, not many bands share U2's sense of the absurd or--as Bono pointed out at February's press conference in a Manhattan K-Mart--the ability to pay for it.

Show designer/director Willie Williams relates that a lot of people were expecting U2 to tone down after their band's last tour, "Zoo TV," a two-and-a-half-year video blitz extravaganza. "Even when we were still out with 'Zoo TV,' people were saying, 'Well, how are you going to follow this? Is the next show going to be a really stripped-down, minimal production?' But, for me, the only way to go was up," Williams says. "Mainly because I could see that U2 were a band hitting their stride when they were doing 'Zoo TV.' They'd found their medium. They'd found a way of playing stadiums that is unlike anybody else, and really worked. It wasn't a one-off; to me it was clearly just the beginning of something."

Williams began sorting out ideas for this tour towards the end of 1995--well before the band's latest album, "POP," was recorded. He spent the next six months bringing different proposals to the band. For "Zoo TV," Williams had explored the use of video as a lighting element, but "I didn't want to do another video show unless it was going to be a significant development over 'Zoo TV.' If the screens were just going to be a bit bigger, I wasn't going to be interested," Williams says. "Ultimately, we found a way of reinventing the whole thing, so that's the way we had to do it."

And they did. After three weeks of pulling everything together in bits and pieces during production rehearsals in Las Vegas, the first show on April 25 was very well received. At the second show in San Diego, it was evident that keeping the faith had paid off. The 200-plus production crew were all routinely going about their duties, and all the equipment, including the delicate video screen, had arrived intact. This detail certainly spelled relief for all involved, but most especially for Williams.

"Obviously, I always believed it would all work--I wouldn't have designed it this way if I didn't," Williams says. "But we didn't know until we saw it. Because we weren't going to see the screen until it was built, until it was way too late, and there was absolutely no Plan B. When we did the K-Mart launch, there wasn't anything there. So we'd already told the world what we were doing before we knew if it was possible.

"The technology is so new that we actually built the screen from components," Williams continues. "It's been extraordinary to do this because there is absolutely no precedent at all. We've just been making it up, including the screen protocol and the way we control it. Most of that was written in Las Vegas; we were incredibly close to the wire. But when they unfolded the screen, put it up, and turned it on, only three out of a million pixel sheets weren't working. That was a big relief."

The designer had focused on the possibility of creating the huge, blue LED screen by July 1996, and at that point, he called on his esteemed colleague, Mark Fisher, to help bring the idea to fruition. "Around that time we got serious about figuring out how we could do a video show that would be absolutely spectacular," Williams says. "At first, Mark wanted to do a canvas webbing so the screen would be fluffy, and he could just drape the screen over everything--like a big Salvador Dali video screen, which would have been very nice."

The designers pursued that idea for a while and had a prototype constructed. "We thought about having a video blanket, which had the LEDs on cargo netting," Fisher says. "We actually put one up at Brilliant Stages in England and brought in Frederic [Opsomer], who rationalized it onto aluminum. It's exciting to see that the band is really pushing at the edges of the future with this video screen. U2 is definitely not frightened to try anything."

The band's investment supported what is now the first videowall to be designed and built by touring personnel: Fisher, Opsomer, and Richard Hartman. "It only takes three hours to put up, which is less time than it takes to put up a Jumbotron one-tenth its size," Fisher says. "Stagehands who have seen everything were very impressed with it because it's been beautifully packaged and executed. And it was nice to see that it actually worked."

Williams credits Fisher almost entirely for the stage's well-executed looks. "As with all things U2, it comes out of endless think tanks, but at the end of the day, Mark took control, and that's why he is credited as the architect of this project," Williams says. "Because it's not a space, it's a building. He spent a lot of time working on the proportions and the lines, and you can really tell. His eye has really been a huge benefit."