XL Video UK is supplying the current Jamiroquai Dynamite world tour with full video production and crew. Vince Foster created the tour’s innovative visual design, which weaves video and lighting into the performance through the use of Barco O-Lite screens.
The tour features 15 surfaces of half-populated (checker-board style) Barco O-Lite screens onstage. The screens are hung in three staggered layers, and make an electronic backdrop for the stage. The giant video wall is being fed by a Catalyst digital media server loaded with content custom created by Foster for the show, triggered by the Wholehog® 3 console, run on tour by visual director Darragh McAuliffe. Using the O-Lite surfaces as another lightsource, both lighting and video are seamlessly collaged into a dynamic, colorful, and animated show.
O-Lite On Stage
The stage space is defined by a series of gently angled trusses curving into a U-shape upstage. All the lighting and O-Lite screens hang from these trusses, plus other video surfaces like the 40 James Thomas Pixelline columns in between the sections of O-Lite.
The upstage visual wall measures 48’ by 20’. It comprises five landscape O-lite screens at the lowest level (3 panels wide, 5 high), five portrait pieces above (5 panels high, 3 wide), and the final layer framing the top edge, which is five truss-border-style landscape pieces of O-Lite.
The wall is used in various ways, as one large screen or 15 individual ones and various combinations in between. “It’s one canvas,” says Foster, “but it splits naturally into 15 screens and has the additional advantage of looking great with lighting shining onto it from the front or through it from behind.”
Video runs on the O-Lite for 80 percent of the show–a mix of texturing, patterns, colors, block illuminations, and the occasional literal image, such as an exploding fireball for “Dynamite” or snippets of the crowd with arms outstretched.
Foster used Motion software to create much of the animated content. He utilized assorted treatments to make the effects, including some scratchy filmic looks, which were culled from photographed chrome surfaces, converted to greyscale, and effected into metallic horizontal moving bands of color. Foster worked with Charlie Kail and Richard Turner in designing and programming the screen.
Alastair McDiarmid and Oliver Derrynck from XL Belgium are the main O-Lite screen technicians. The high-resolution SMD 10mm pitch O-Lite panels (each mini panel containing 8x11 pixels) were purchased by XL from Barco specifically for the tour. McDiarmid and Derrynck are using Barco’s new Director Toolset software for traditional screen control and to map the strings of O-Lite to each individual screen panel’s control box. It is driven by Barco’s standard D320 processors.
XL Video IMAG Package
XL Video is also supplying a five-camera digital PPU and IMAG package for the side screens, directed live by Gary Tepper. The package includes XL’s standard digital PPUs and includes one of their new GV Zodiak mixer/switchers. There are three Sony D50 cameras–FOH, on track in the pit, and hand-held onstage–and two remote operated mini-cams onstage. The IMAG is beamed onto two 12’x16’ portrait format side screens, fed by rear projecting Barco G10s.
The VDOSC sound system is being supplied by Britannia Row. FOH is mixed by Rick Pope and monitors by Andrew Thornton. Tour manager is Zop and production manager is Derek McVay.
Des Fallon is project managing the for XL Video. Other members of XL’s crew are Larne Poland, Gavin Thomson, and Gordon Davies. Since the lighting and video for the tour is linked so closely together, the XL crew is working closely with the Neg Earth lighting crew, chiefed by Brad Imrie.