Production designer Mike Keeling of Project X and director Mark Romanek put together this singular look."The idea here is having the band on this raw stage and everything is done in silhouette with lighting and key lighting," Keeling explains. "Once we embarked on it, Mark and I just decided to do the entire video in LED lighting. That was the criterion. I got chills just thinking about it."
When Keeling originally introduced the director to the Versa TUBE and Versa TILE technology, they had planned to use only 30 to 40 TUBEs. "But then I showed him it was video capable, so we talked about using it differently, and I suggested we take the sleeves off," Keeling says. "And Mark liked them that way - he liked the flare. So after that, the whole concept exploded, and it's a phenomenal look."
Keeling also used an inventive approach to programming the lighting. "We used audio programming," he says. "Using Chris Martin's vocal track, an animator on site took stems of the track - which is taking vocals, keyboards, drums, and bass guitar and splintering them out. Then we keyed off just his vocal range and, within an animation, let that oscillate with the music. Then, what we animated there on several Apple computers was then put through the M Box from PRG, which was then sent through a Wholehog II console with the programming that was then sent to the D2 Versa Drive processor from Element Labs. Then it was all projected on the screen. The director and I just looked at each other and said, 'Wow!' It just blew us away."
The M Box provided DMX control of the video content from a server. "So the video was running the Versa TUBEs," explains Jeremy Hochman of Element Labs. "In addition to the 640 Versa TUBEs in the wall, the key lights were composed of two, four, eight and 16 Versa TUBEs. Those key lights were also controlled via an M Box and could either be white (a dialed-in shade of white to match the white balance that they needed for camera), or they could play video.
"So the wall would be doing one thing and one key light would be white on the singer and then another key light on each side was playing video content so that the singer or the guitar player or whoever was also being properly lit," Hochman continues. "At the same time, you could see that images along the side of his face or on his body were kind of mimicking the colours on the wall."
Hochman helped the programmers map the content with three Versa Drive D2 processors. "Two were running the back wall and one was running the key lights," he explains. "I worked with Martin Philips, who was the programmer, and Andre Lear from PRG who was setting up the M Boxes for the appropriate resolutions. I created several maps on the Versa Drives so they could precisely map the video content to the specific areas that they needed. Andre created masks so that in the M Box they could dial in colour or video to specific key lights. And Martin programmed everything on a Wholehog II. The actual content was animated by a couple of guys - one was Vello Virkhaus, who owns V squared Labs, which produced the animated content."
"One of the things that Mark wanted to do was make sure the transition of the LED lighting on the background also replicated what was going on in front," Keeling adds. "So everything in the front turned out to be a gorgeous, soft front light from the LED source. So we could go no color, we could change it to any color
