Video director is Blue Leach, and the show's visual design is a tight collaboration of imagination and style created collectively by Leach, lighting designer Davey Sherwin and Catalyst programmer and operator Robin Haddow. The three are dubbed 'The Art Department' on the tour.
XL Video's project managers are Jo Beirne and Phil Mercer ."With Blue, Robin and Davey working together on a project you are guaranteed some spectacular results and a beautiful, thought-provoking, different and intricately constructed show."
Six trussing pods are the architecture centrepiece of the stage visuals. They are all flown on a Kinesys automation system operated by Dave Jolly and move into different positions throughout the show, culminating in a giant snowflake - the band's logo - at the end of the set.
The undersides of the Pods are all clad with Barco FLX-24 'transformable' LED pixels, for which XL built bespoke PCB mounts that produce a 30 mm pitch surface. This relatively new product provides an extremely dynamic series of off-beat video surfaces that can work in multiple configurations.
The Pods involved much co-operation between XL's team and the tour's lighting contractors HSL. Both their technical requirements had to be incorporated into the design, which also had to be tourable and practical for fitting into a variety of different sized venues.
The Pods are constructed to split apart, stack, and fit into custom designed dollies for transit and quick and easy deployment / de-rigging in the venue. They are looked after by the two set carpenters Ash Groom and Martin Barraclough. A fibre system is used to connect the Barco DX700 processors running each pod back to the racks side stage.
Upstage is a 60ft wide by 30ft deep hang of Element Labs Stealth transparent screen, which has a gauze hung in front and a grey cyc at the back, so with lighting applied to the different surfaces, it can be completely 'disappeared' for the numbers where no content is playing on it.
The screen surfaces are all fed with a mix of IMAG and playback footage, all of which is output, mapped and managed for the screens via the Catalyst media server operated by Robin Haddow via a Hog PC console.
Leach mixes from the FOH position using a pair of Ableton Novation Launchpad MIDI controllers.
XL Video's crew chief is Roger Nelson, the chief LED technician is Icarus Wilson-Wright, Rob Wick is looking after cameras and operating the Polecam during the show, Al Bollard is also on LED duty and the "semi-legendary" Myway is engineering.
There will be more on Snow Patrol's latest tour in the March issue of Lighting&Sound International.(Jim Evans)
