The feat of technical engineering was project managed by XL Events' Robin Evans working with technical director David Mulcahy and XL's IT expert Ian Woodall.
The story began with a discussion between Coldplay's production manager Wob Roberts and XL Video director Des Fallon some months previously. Roberts comments: "The initial inspiration came from Coldplay's creative director Phil Harvey after seeing XL's mapping of the Ralph Lauren building in London. Once the team had demo'd the concept to all of us, the band confirmed that they wanted to go ahead with it as a show-stopping effect for this year's Glasto."
Concepts for the projection were first shown to the Coldplay team using live server feeds into Cast's WYSIWIG software, which allowed a 3D visualisation of how the projection might look. As the project progressed a 1:50 scale model of the Pyramid Stage provided a 'real' surface for test visuals.
Evans comments: "The challenges were many - from where to locate the projectors to dealing with mapping the video to the unique shape of the stage, to designing a super-stable data network."
Mulcahy adds: "As the Pyramid Stage had never been used in this way before there were numerous unknowns needing to be incorporated into the projection calculations - from the actual response of the stage's skin surfaces to the projection, though to the levels of ambient light that would be present. We had to make allowances for all these factors and others to ensure that the final projections would be bright enough and have contrast ratios that would work on camera."
Twenty-two high powered projectors were installed in three locations, together with a fully redundant Ethernet network, and some meticulous masking, mapping and programming in four Coolux Pandora's Box media servers undertaken to make the video content fit the surfaces. Philip Ward of Universal Everything produced the custom material.
The final projector tower positions were decided after close collaboration between the XL team and Dick Tee, Glastonbury's production manager. To get the basic parameters established archival aerial photos and video footage was studied. Festival owner Michael Eavis had to give his personal consent and Tee had to undertake some serious health & safety risk assessments before any of the projector platforms could be built. The stage left structure was right in the middle of a public area and the main thoroughfare across the Pyramid section of the site for egress from the John Peel stage.
The stage right tower was positioned in the BBC compound 100m away from the stage. It was loaded with nine Barco FLM HD20 projectors, all of which were overlaid to produce one mega bright image of 175,000 ANSI Lumens.
The stage left tower was a repeat of this, but 120m away from the Pyramid Stage. This tower was offset, so the projection trajectory had to be warped in the Pandora's Box running that side of the effect, so it appeared straight on to the side of the stage.
The FOH tower was 105m away behind the main sound/lighting platform. It housed four Barco FLM R22s, emitting approximately 84,000 ANSI lumens above the top canopy at the front of the Pyramid stage.
Control was situated in a portable cabin at stage right and received SMPTE timecode from Coldplay's backline Pro Tools system. This timecode then fed the band's touring Catalyst media server system (operated by Ben Miles) and the Pandoras Box Media Server Manager to ensure that the complete system was in sync. A fully redundant server solution was utilised to provide a 'hot' backup, and both systems ran locked to
