Muse made history on Friday, 15 April 2016 when they played to a record-breaking 21,000 fans at The O2 Arena, London.
The Drones tour combines tracking, lighting, videos, flying elements and a lot of creativity, to create visuals and spontaneous interactivity unique for a live rock concert like this one.
BlackTrax real-time motion tracking solution from CAST BlackTrax Ltd is used to track and manage three technical elements, from band members to massive drones that fly above the audience as well as for projection-based storytelling. The area tracked is BlackTrax's largest to date!
Drones warns of Orwellian dangers and choices in modern life threatening to turn people into robots. Somewhat Sci-Fi, the audience revolts and takes a thrilling journey musically and visually.
"We've worked with Muse for 16 years and push pioneering technology to its limits at each arena, in front of around 24,000 people each time," says Oli Metcalfe who also designs lighting and stage concepts for a number of international artists.
Moment Factory co-founder and chief of innovation Dominic Audet said, "BlackTrax is the only solution that was out there that could reliably be used to track new interactive 3D technology on an unprecedented scale. The immersive interactive and pre-rendered video content experience we provided is one of the most ambitious and innovative concert projects Moment Factory has ever undertaken."
"Drones took a year to design and test," adds Metcalfe. "We conduct a laser scan of each venue and created workflows of video, lighting, and actors using wysiwyg lighting design and previsualization software. This gave us accurate data for placement of BlackTrax tracking cameras showing how the system would work before we even got there. Running BlackTrax with wysiwyg is critical."
The stage set splits the arena floor in half, creating a theatre in the round experience, and focus on a large drone-like structure. As the concert starts, twelve clear spherical drones with glowing lights float down above the band. Then, four drones each are launched, from the North and South platforms above the stage, with two drones each being launched from East and West platforms above the stage.
During the show, larger 'Reaper' aircraft-like drones with glowing LEDs are launched into the audience and are tracked alongside lighting fixtures while flying through the arena. All drones in the production are completely autonomous.
A large, cylindrical LED video screen is hung at centre. Content is managed using Catalyst media servers, and within it LED video strips come cascading out.
In total, 38 BlackTrax cameras are used for tracking of drones and performers. The tracking system includes 14 drone trackables and three artist trackables. The system runs on an active server with backup / slave system and integrates with twenty-four Mac Viper Air FX, and six Clay Paky Mythos lighting fixtures. Positional information is sent to Barco's XPR media servers, which manage content across twelve Barco HDF-W30 FLEX projectors. Each projector is fitted with custom-made moving mirrors to focus on either the 200 square meters of projection voile or to be used as area effects around the arena.
For a full production report on the Drones tour, see the March 2016 issue of LSi.
(Jim Evans)
