XL Produces Roger Waters' The Wall

XL Video provided production to to Roger Waters' recent 'The Wall Live' world tour, which wrapped in Paris on September 21 with a sold out Stade de France show, exactly three years and one week after its opening show in Toronto in 2010.
Video Director Richard Turner worked with XL’s Project Manager Phil Mercer throughout, together with Tour Director Andrew Zweck and Creative and Video Content Director Sean Evans.
Every single brick in a 420 ft wide projected wall was individually mapped, and the built section cued into place during a choreographed construction over the course of the first half of the show.
The original production design concept and base architecture for The Wall tour was created by stage architects Jonathan Park and the late Mark Fisher, and dates back to the first Wall Tour by Pink Floyd in 1980/81.
The cardboard bricks of the 2010-2013 tour were built by TAIT who also supplied all the stage machinery and engineering.
It was erected and demolished each gig by a team of 15 dedicated carpenters headed up by Denny Rich.
TVisuals were projected onto the wall by 36 of XL’s new Panasonic PT-DZ21K 20K projectors – divided into nine screen areas – each covered by a quad stack rigged on standard Leyher scaffold platforms at FOH.
Edge-blending was achieved by custom manual shutters clamped onto the scaffold towers.
Previously when they played arenas, a special DMX controlled shuttering system, comprising a series of metal blades on adjustable screw threads, was devised by Turner and built by TAIT to ensure that there could be a complete blackout across each batch of projectors.
At 15,200 pixels wide for the stadium show, the video content was being projected at nine times higher resolution than HD.
After Effects was used to split the full 15k canvas into 10 individual playback channels. Content was stored on 10 Mac Mini servers (10 more provided fully redundant backup) with 10 x AJA IoXT capture / playback boxes plugged in via Thunderbolt to give a hardware gen-lock across all 20 machines for frame-accurate playback.
Each Mac Mini was running a Final Cut project for assembly and changes - the resultant movies were syncronised with VVTR from Gallery.co.uk.
Ten Blackmagic ATEM switchers – one channel per screen area - was used to apply specific effects like lighting and keying across the content, all connected together by another hot-rodded piece of software called Just Macros.
The ATEMs were also used for fast and responsive direct mixing of live camera feeds for the IMAG projections which came from two of XL’s Sony HXC100s stationed at FOH with long lenses.
Having consumed over three years of his life, Richard Turner comments: "A very common complaint or excuse is 'No time - No money'. The latest touring version of 'The Wall' demonstrates what can be achieved when you have a leader with plenty of both, and more importantly a clear, intelligent, reasoned vision of the goal."
On XL Video, Turner comments: "XL’s global reach, unparalleled touring video experience and 24/7 support was a constant reassurance whilst out on the road. Their willingness to embrace new technologies really helped when we wanted to use Panasonic projectors because of their small, light and compact form factor. XL was faultless as usual."
www.xlvideo.com
(IT/CD)