ETC London Supplies Clouseau Video
Large format projection specialists ETC London are supplying 18 Christie S20 Roadster projectors to Belgian superstars Clouseau for their 18-night run at the 15,000 capacity Antwerp Sportpalais.
ETC London was brought into the imaginative mix by set and visuals designer Bart Clement, who is working for the band for the first time. Clement is known for being inventive and original when it comes to defining stage environments, and this one was no exception! He created a giant 17 metre high by 30 wide curved wave-like back wall and projection surface from nearly 400 aluminium cubes covered in white Polystretch fabric.
With Clouseau’s latest album being edgier than some of their previous works, Clement wanted to give the stage a strong and fluid visual identity, and chose video as a powerful medium for this. He has worked with the ETC London office on many other projects – all of them challenging and different.
Clouseau’s main cube projection surface was made by WiCreations, and is fed by 12 of ETC’s Christies, configured as 2 flown stacks of 3 focussed on the centre of the screen, with two more either side of stage on the deck, mounted in short towers.
Two additional stacks of 3 projectors per side are straight hung and cover left and right IMAG projection areas.
Each screen is fed by one OnlyView control server.
Using OnlyView, ETC’s own flexible control platform, the programming/operating team of Phil Pieridis and Briony Margetts are also taking in 3 live HD cameras feeds supplied by Alphacam from video director Hans Pancake’s live mix. These are split into the three main screen servers, allowing footage to appear either as one giant image on the central screen or as two individual feeds on the side screens - or across all 3 surfaces simultaneously. IMAG can also be intermixed with all the graphics and video playback material.
Video of one sort or another runs through most of the show. IMAG is mainly confined to the side screens, occasionally straying onto the central screen, but this area primarily features special video playback footage produced by Clement’s team - including leading graphic artist Tom Hemerijk - that is loaded onto the OnlyView servers.
This content includes from bold, colourful movement sequences to more abstract floating effects, all of it spectacular due to the scale and quirky appearance of the undulating curves and broken up surface of the screen.
The show is being run by Pieridis, using a combination of timecode and manual cues.
There have been many projection challenges and OnlyView has proved invaluable in dealing with these.
The projectors are quite severely off axis in terms of where they normally should, be because of the screen’s 3D curves, particularly at the extremes, where the overlay is not perfect like it would be on a flat surface. However using OnlyView makes the line up under these circumstances a relatively straightforward task.
Each area of the screen is mapped to the video by overlaying the cubes, and then programmed as a 2D show, with each block making up the screen, and represented in OnlyView in a light-box style effect. They photographed the screen area from the lens of each projector stack, inverted it in PhotoShop and used it as a mask in OnlyView to place the image exactly on the cubes.
They also made the most of OnlyView’s ‘Screen Warping’ facilities to bend the images to the 3D surface and make them appear in the correct aspect ratio
All Clement’s media was made to fit the screen resolution thus utilising the full palette of each Christie projector.
All the projectors are networked via a Christienet wireless Ethernet hub, which issues each machine with its own IP address, allowing the projector functions to be controlled via a wireless tablet PC from anywhere in the venue – which has been a great asset.
Sound and lighting equipment is being supplied by Belgian rental house EML, and Clouseau’s LD is LucPeumans. | Click on the pictures for the large version |
