Markus Blee presented Adrian Offord and Stuart Young of CT and TV lighting director Gurdip Mahal, with two projected models of the design. Some 138sq.m of 25mm LED display was to be arranged in random shapes, the multi-faced media display enveloping the performers, set off by two 9sq.m Barco iLite 8 panels - one upstage centre of the dancefloor and the other offstage left. The content, provided by moving light operator Ross Williams, would be fired to the four colour-coded 25mm zones via the Catalysts, while the higher resolution Barco screens would take a mixture of live camera footage and Catalyst graphics content.
Blee explained: "I wanted to transform the normal use of LED - where it's used as a pictorial device - and turn it into a virtual architectural world, by creating an environment without any boundaries and allowing the set to constantly change in shape and texture. In other words I wanted to create a studio without walls or parameters."
But the designer was up against the physical constraints of the Riverside itself - presenting a huge technical challenge for ELP, who were responsible for the stage rigging and location services. CT's Stuart Young says: "The Riverside doesn't have the best grid and given the way it was visually intended to stack up, we had to look at what we had to rig with - although the 25mm is quite lightweight. A lot of the equipment was flown out of the roof in sections and the remainder was groundstacked on its side to increase the amount of area that Markus wanted to cover."
A further 16 modules of 25mm section was laid on its back and covered with brilliant acrylic to form the dancefloor. Blee says. "What has made this seminal is that the LED has been used in an unorthodox fashion - breaking away from the conventional formats, and zoning the graphics into eight areas which encompass the stage, creating surfaces which can change colour, texture and apparent 'virtual' dimension at will. The environment became the light box and the light source, enabling me to run the screens a lot higher than I anticipated."
Blee praised the production team for being receptive to his ideas, adding that the creation would not have been possible without "the undivided commitment" of CT's Adrian Offord and Stuart Young." Blee concluded: "I wanted to quite literally explode the environment usually associated with set design, and by so doing watch the complexity of previously harmonious forms and shapes move to another dimension. It appeared to work and was truly breathtaking."
