Driscoll and film editor Richard Overall have again teamed up with video scientist Richard Turner to produce the visuals, working in close collaboration with lighting designer Mark Henderson and Tiger Aspect’s production manager Steve Rebbeck. The production’s principal projection sequence takes place during the seminal Madness hit Driving In My Car. The Morris Minor car comes onstage, and the minimal set turns into a giant three-sided screen surface, in old-fashioned Cinema 180 film projection style. The footage propels car and cast on a journey which starts on the streets of Camden Town, careers into the English countryside, via a giant wooden rollercoaster in Great Yarmouth into the sky and then into outer space.
Driscoll wanted to keep the material filmic and panoramic in homage to the Cinerama era. He utilized a combination of 35mm and Super 16, shot on an Arri 435 camera equipped with a time-lapse door, and an Arri SR II camera employing time lapse and long exposure techniques along the way. The footage itself was shot on a tracking vehicle on location in Camden, East Sussex, East Anglia and Great Yarmouth Pleasure Beach, where the original Madness ‘House of Fun’ video was shot. The roller-coaster sequence involved approximately a dozen rides on the attraction with the camera on a custom rig. The insert’s final aerial sequences were shot aboard a light aircraft, whilst the space sequence is a computer-generated animation created by Richard Overall.
Projectors are four front-projected Barco 9200s (two running and two spare) with 1.5:3 zoom lenses, rigged to the roof of the theatre’s dress circle, with a throw distance of 21 metres. XL commissioned steel fabricator KP Martins to fabricate and install four special steel brackets that run down through the floor of the upper circle, enabling the projectors to be rigged tight to the ceiling of the dress circle, to avoid audience sightline issues. The projectors are cross-projected, to ensure image coverage of half the upstage rear screen and all the way along the automated side flats, which can also be ‘slatted'. These flats fly in and out at various times throughout the show, whilst soft-edge flags are used in front of the projections, to blend the projection for a seamless centre.
The video images are stored on a Digital Doremi hard drive, fired from an Electrosonic 1561 control box and a laptop in the lighting desk booth. This command also opens and closes the shutters for total blackout when projection is not being shown. To reduce the ambient noise of the projectors when idle, Richard Turner enabled ‘Boost’ mode, a lesser used function of the Barco, that puts the machine into ‘Silent’ mode when it’s finished outputting the cue and the shutters come down. This yields less than half the sound output of the fans, a factor that helps enormously in the show’s quieter moments. All signals are SDI, for quality and low noise. Since the show features a live band, all the video is sync’ed to the click track to ensure the timing is accurate.
(Ruth Rossington)
