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Oasis Video Encourages New Blood
The band’s overall video production was co-ordinated by video director Dick Carruthers’ company, Cheese Film & Video Productions, with touring video production manager Dave Wright overseeing the 35- strong video crew.
The show was a dynamic, pacey mix of live camera and specially created playback sources onto six LED screens – four onstage that moved up and down on a Kinesys vari-speed automation system, and stage left and right side screens.
Carruthers and programmer Richard Turner also maximised XL’s pre-programming facilities for prepping the show at their Hertfordshire HQ, once again working with XL’s project manager for Oasis, Des Fallon. XL’s Dickie Burford engineered the DPU at FOH, alongside Carruthers and Turner.
Des Fallon says: “It’s been very interesting working with two different but each highly creative individuals like Andi and Dick.”
Oasis have a long history of embracing innovative video in their live shows. For this one they wanted a coherent visual aesthetic across both mediums of lighting and video explains Andi Watson. Watson brought his own visual ideas into the equation as well as being given some definite directions by the band, Noel Gallagher in particular.
Watson – renowned for his amazing and inventive designs - collaborated with Carruthers – who’s worked with Oasis since 1995 to develop the show. He also brought video producer Justine Catterall onboard for some fresh input, plus Pip Rhodes, who was asked to work specifically on generating Catalyst content.
For the show, he kept many of the playback sources under his direction, triggered from the WholeHog II lighting desk via the Catalyst, leaving Carruthers free to develop the live camera mix each night – an appreciation of the fact that although working together, playback and the live mix are also separate visual entities with their own distinct requirements.
Watson wanted to pull new talent into the creative melting pot, and approached - among others - students at the Liverpool Institute of Performing Arts (LIPA) via Theatre & Performance Design tutor Kathy Sandys. They were offered the chance to produce video material for consideration as show footage, and ex student Julia Hesselberg’s work was incorporated into two songs.
In total, Watson’s team produced content for about 12 songs, all but two of which were run through the Catalyst, controlled with PixelMAD software triggered from the lighting desk. Footage for two songs was run directly from the hard drives.
Playback video was beamed onto the four moving onstage Barco D-Lite 7 LED screens. These were used as a constantly moving montage of coloured and textured lightsources, graphics, abstracts and some more literal video images.
It was Noel Gallagher’s initial idea to record the band during rehearsals. For the show, this footage was beamed in black and white across all 6 screens and skilfully interwoven with Carruthers’ full colour live mix, creating some of the show’s most memorable video moments. An intricate space-time juxtaposition between past and present. All other times, IMAG was confined to the two side LED screens.
Carruthers explained how he imbibed each show with a unique real-time filmic quality via the live mix, with the artful application of some electronic aids including two 6-channel EVS LSM-XT live production servers which he used as slow motion devices. The LSM-XT is a 6-channel instant access server capable of simultaneous recording and playback and also an efficient non linear editor for live event recording …. It’s common in the world of sports broadcasting.
Richard Burford ran the Dataton that talked to the DVEs and the master matrix switcher. Their ‘Monster mix’ allowed the routing of any video source to any destination, complete with a number of recalls. The Catalyst material was also input into one of the DVEs so Carruthers had it there at his disposal if desired, as well as it being run direct from the lighting desk.
The fast moving show was a multi-faceted collage of images, lighting effects, music, sound and imagination that worked brilliantly as an iconic statement of stadium rock.
1st August 2005
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