Richard Turner, the tour's video director worked closely with XL's project manager Phil Mercer throughout, together with tour director Andrew Zweck and creative and video content director Sean Evans. The production featured both stadium and arena versions.
The show visuals 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.
Seamless edge-blending was achieved by custom manual shutters clamped onto the scaffold towers. Physical shuttering and blending was demanded by the "black" nature of the content - if only electronic blending had been used, the "tombstone" effect of the eight overlapping projectors in the blend zone would have been unacceptable to Roger Waters.
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 show was recorded every night for Waters. A long lens camera was used to follow him and composited with a live wide shot and close ups from the fake IMAG so he could learn every move from the shoot and mimic it perfectly whilst it was playing out onscreen.
The Wall Live tour played 219 shows worldwide to more than 4.1m ticket buyers, grossing $460m, which is not only the highest grossing tour ever by a solo artist, but also, reportedly, the third highest grossing tour of all time.
(Jim Evans)
