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XL Video is Faithless
XL Video is supplying video projection and cameras to the Faithless “To All New Arrivals” tour, forming an integral element of LD and visual designer Ivan Morandi’s provocative live show aesthetics.
Morandi, one of the most inventive visual designers of the moment, has worked with the band for seven years and has always seen lighting and moving images as a potentially symbiotic phenomenon, However this is the first time that Faithless have gone really large on the video.
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, who turn the stage and auditorium on their heads, recreating a giant rave atmosphere for the set. He also wanted to ensure that some of the serious elements of their art were not lost in the mix.
He observes that in the west right now, there’s more recreational drug use than ever before, and he wanted to produce a non-narrative visual trail that presented a collage of images and perceptions to those watching – which they could take in any number of directions.
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’s 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, leaving some very distinct impressions and images on the eyes and the consciousness.
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.
Some of it is highly political, provocative and emotive. Footage for the compelling “Bombs” is a mashed-up triple split of three people getting dressed – a fighter pilot, a small child with the aid of him mum and a suicide bomber.
The idea is not to use video as a preaching tool, instead it’s presented as a non-literal take on reality – a puzzle, a mosaic, a complex montage of images that can be interpreted, unravelled and processed in any number of ways by the diverse mix of individuals, personalities and minds watching and feeling the show. There’s a lot more to a Faithless show than dropping a bunch of happy pills!
Camera wise, 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, ensconced backstage mixing the IMAG on a GV 1200 switcher, adding more weirdness if necessary with a Magic DVE. He received an initial brief from Morandi detailing what he wanted, and he also injects his own creative ideas into the IMAG melting pot. “It’s always interesting and fun working with Ivan” he says, “His ideas are often ‘out there’ and totally different, non-predictable and he is a great visual innovator.”
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.
Morandi’s lighting (kit supplied by Neg Earth) bathes the band in waves of colour and beams, incorporating those big ravey moments as the music demands and providing a subtle-but-connected contrast to the visuals, which can get as abstract and kaleidoscopic as well as real and questioning. It’s a show inviting as much or as little interaction as you want from what’s being presented, while enjoying some of the most superlative electro rock music on the planet!
XL’s crew of five are 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.
27th March 2007
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