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JVR’s Record Breaking Screen for Christmas
With a relatively small geographic market, Bauer enjoys the luxury of having his audience come to him, rather than having to tour his shows to them. And come they did: with three sell-out 28,000 capacity shows over the Christmas period, and a welcome day off for the cast and crew on 25th December!
The single location and spectacular venue allowed a level of production and theatrics which would be all but impossible on a touring show. The centre piece of the set, was the video screen - in fact the screen was the set. Similar in proportion to the ground breaking system on U2’s legendary Popmart tour, this screen was not however a low resolution, pixelated background effect. It was 500 square metres of Barco’s D7 outdoor product assembled into arguably the largest and highest resolution display ever built Europe and even worldwide if fixed installations are discounted.
Dutch video specialists JVR (an Avesco plc company), and now established video suppliers to Bauer’s extravaganzas, were called upon to pull the project together. JVR’s sales director Jeroen Jongenelen commented: “The Barco D7 is the only system that offered the resolution required and was available in sufficient quantities to enable us to pull off a project of this scale. Even so, we ended up bringing in equipment from numerous suppliers, some within our group. For the two weeks leading up to the show we saw a steady stream of sea and air shipments from around the world into our Roosendaal base and had to pull all of these packages into one giant, seamless and uniformly matched screen.”
It was no small task, but one that JVR’s rather exhausted-looking but justifiably smiling project manager Peter Scherbeijn was clearly more than capable of. The statistics of the screen alone are impressive. Constructed from 2,496 Dlite 7 tiles, it measured 44 metres wide by 12m high. Even without the benefit of the D7’s virtual pixel technology (switched off on this occasion) the display had an overall resolution of 3072 x 832, better than many projection systems and resulting in an overall pixel count of 2.6 million or 12,800,000 LED’s. The entire system was built in six hours by three JVR crew and around 40 stage hands and it then took another 36 hours to cable prior to switch-on. Once on, the schedule allowed two further days for alignment and testing prior to the dress rehearsal, long days that extended into long nights in order to achieve the optimum processing configuration.
Supported on a purpose-built base and scaffold support, from Stageco, the 55 tonne screen, consuming a massive 850kW on peak white, was built in a giant curve, requiring a 13.3mm spacer between the upstage edge of each module - a spectacular combination of brute force and precision engineering!
From the moment the house lights dimmed, and surprisingly not one of the 13 million LED’s glowed in the dark, the show itself was a true production spectacular. The opening sequence featuring distant images (by Cratetown, Philip Pelgrom) of Bethlehem across the sand dunes, with wise men apparently leading live camels in silhouette across the front of the stage, gave way to various abstract graphic sequences, including a stunning mirror ball/kaleidoscope sequence featuring large computer generated mirror balls on screen behind a vast tracking ball on stage and eight smaller units in the satellite lighting clusters around the auditorium. The constantly animated backdrop then switched to depict the spectacular interior of a gothic cathedral to accompany a series of gospel style traditional Christmas Carols complete with massed dancing choirs and Alleluias all round.
In addition to the screen itself, JVR provided a three-camera digital production system, utilising their new Sony D50 cameras with long lenses from sister company Presteigne and the front end screen processing which comprised an Electrosonic Vector videowall controller to split the incoming feed across the four screen segments. Input to the Vector was routed through a Folsom Screen Pro Plus (provided by Creative Technology), to allow multiple graphics feeds to be mixed at native resolution with 625 line output from the live switch.
Two projection screens were installed midway down the venue with JVR’s new and very compact Sanyo 10k projectors, providing exceptional projection quality onto 20x15 screens from an almost briefcase sized projector. These screens purely showed the live imag images of the artist.
With lighting and sound by EML the overall technical production was co-ordinated by Dennis van der Haagen and Roderik Versnel of Sightline Productions and produced/promoted by Rocket Productions, Peter Haarbrink.
In picture: on stage during rehearsals, the live video 44m wide, the mirror ball kaleidoscope, and the Christmas Cake.
11th January 2005
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