The tour, run by Steve Nolan's Chromatic Productions Ltd, featured a front projected 80ft wide by 15ft high screen using eight Barco ELM R18 projectors, relaying two hours of high resolution CGI narrative visuals, created by Media Station. The tour was project managed for XL by Paul Wood who says: "It was a great privilege and pleasure to be involved with this hugely popular and ambitious tour." On the road was XL's Dicky Burford as chief engineer, with video director Nick Fry and a team of three engineer/projectionists and two cameramen to realise the visions of both Wayne and production designer Jonathan Park. Both were very involved in the process and brought a series of strong initial ideas to the visual equation. All playback visuals - including the narration - were stored on four 2-channel Grass Valley Turbo IDDR hard drives (two pairs run live, plus back up devices) and synchronized to the audio track via SMPTE timecode. Overall show control was run by Barco Events Manager control system. The R18 projectors were rigged onto their own trusses, and the precise daily line up was undertaken by head projectionist Clarke Anderson. Director Nick Fry was brought in by XL to sensitively direct and overlay playback visuals onto the narrative footage. He cut the mix using one of XL's Digital Production Units with a Sony DFS700 vision mixer, and this was mapped onto the large screen using one of XL's 4 output channel Barco Folsom Encore systems, overseen by Burford. Fry worked with two Sony D50 cameras in the pit, and concentrated on weaving footage of the 5 principals into the screen action using a maximum of two 'windows' at any one time on the main screen. "The brief was to look unlike standard IMAG," says Fry, who enjoyed the challenge enormously. The Martian Fighting Machine and the Richard Burton head were made by Steel Monkey, with the head projected onto by two of XL's Barco ELM G10's, located at the FOH position. Burton had recorded the audio for the album but was not filmed reciting the words, and unfortunately died shortly before this was scheduled to happen. Media Station skilfully merged a similar pair of real talking lips onto Burton's face, making it appear to be him relaying the story on the giant head. This element tricked many audience members into thinking it was produced by some sort of holographic magic rather then a simple video projection, and has generated reams of discussion on internet bulletin boards! XL also supplied a Catalyst DL1 moving head fixture with camera capabilities, mounted onto the underbelly of the MFM, which was used at particular moments to create the 'Martian's eye view' by scanning the audience, with its output then fed into the video mix. (Chris Henry)
XL Video on <I>War Of The Worlds</I>
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