Take That global logo goes on tour
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Vaughan quickly called upon the technical prowess of Video Design, who had supported Take That’s previous outing in 2016 and the engineering skills of Brilliant. “The key is knowing how to respond to extreme conceptual design,” was Vaughan’s assessment. “That, and the willingness to do so. A 10m diameter rotating sphere covered in high definition video is not commodity based, you don’t rent it off the shelf like sound and lighting equipment.”
The final result, supervised by CV Productions engineering point man Nick Evans, is 47 tons of steel, aluminium, motion control, and a virtually seamless skin of video tiles. “It took us almost a month, working closely with Nick and the guys at Brilliant just to solve the issues of fixing two and a half thousand 12mm WinVision flat square video tiles to a spherical surface without the appearance of visually unacceptable gaps between tiles,” explained Video Design’s CEO, Alex Leinster.
“A fantastic painstaking job headed up by Jack Middlebrook who now leads our team to assemble the sphere on tour. At the same time, Luke Collins, a man who likes a challenge, resolved the task of how to manage and map content from the Disguise servers to the sphere. That’s quite an achievement in itself, he likened it to playing 3D chess in your head. Funnily enough, all that has made building almost 430 sq.m of back screen and assembling a six camera PPU for Paul Eggerton to capture some great IMAG shots on a daily basis seem easy by comparison. This has been a mighty task.”
Vaughan is delighted with the effort. “On tour we have to get it up and working in eight hours and that has been achieved by the willingness of everyone involved, from Stufish through Nick Evans, down to Brilliant and Video Design. It is a phenomenal achievement. It works, it moves, it looks fantastic and it arrived pretty much on time, that’s a testament to all involved.”
(Jim Evans)
