Providing the central visual focus of the production, the stage-wide LED video curtain, using 100m² of panels for a screen size of 14 x 7m, showed the work of video director John Minton and video content designers As Described, an hallucinatory smorgasbord of grungy imagery and deliberately lo-fi, distorted i-mag work.
Stage Electrics was brought in by As Described, and flew the screen from four 1 ton Lodestars and 14m of Prolyte Truss, as well as supplying mains distro and a portable production unit consisting of two Analog Way Tetra-VIO scalers, preview monitors and a 32x32 Composite Matrix Switcher. For the final two IBYM shows at Alexandra Palace the video production was expanded to include a pair of Sanyo XF47 15K projectors, back projecting onto a pair of 16' x 9' fast fold screens. Stage Electrics' input was completed by black drapes.
This high technology was fed by a deliberately lo-fi camera and production system. A mix of pre-created content was blended with heavily treated images from 10 CCTV cameras dotted around the stage and two more backstage in what the team describe as their 'dirt box' to create video feedback loops and other effects.
Video director John Minton explained how the show's visuals had come together. "It has evolved through years of working with Portishead - a long collaboration," he said. "It's a very analogue look, very glitchy; degrading the image, a VHS look. A lot of the visuals do actually bounce down to VHS; we put them through circuit bending, glitch boxes and so on; it's all very hands-on and live. The cameras we use are CCTV standard definition monochrome cameras."
Screen content was fed from the cameras via a matrix into a pair of vision mixers along with As Described's media, running in Resolume on a MacBook Pro using a Midi controller. Parts of the edit were routed to a pair of black and white CRT monitors, then refilmed and put back into the loop to create video feedback.
As Described director Adam Seaman - whose business partner, Jim Horsfield, handled the Resolume programming - comments, "We were looking for a very good screen to do the job, and because we were doing the festival circuit it needed to go up fast, be light and flexible and generally practical to use. We went to Stage Electrics and they came up with a really good solution for a good price for us and we've been really happy with it."
Stage Electrics' account manager Mark Connolly adds, "Our screen has a wide viewing angle of 170 degrees and the refresh rate is 800Hz, which is great for television. One billion colours, an eighth-generation control system and it weighs 14 kilos per square metre -a good formula." It all packed into Stage Electrics-designed 'meat racks' in pre-assembled two by three panel sections, in the care of Stage Electrics video techs Rupert Dean and Pete Finn, and video hire specialist Chris Lewis.
(Jim Evans)
