XL Video Supply Chemical Brothers |
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| Tuesday, 05 April 2005 19:43 | |||||||
The Chemical’s visuals have always been cutting edge, and worked seamlessly into their thumping dance rhythms and the essence of their live show – and this is no exception. Once again, the band are very much ephemeral shadows and silhouettes onstage, ensconced behind racks of knobs, digits and codes, creating beautiful noise whilst letting the visuals let rip with narrative info, always stimulating the subconscious. The highly original source material is created and compiled by Adam Smith, who’s been involved with the band for many years. It’s a heterogeneity of insects, animals, plants, coloured robots, politics, history, colour, shapes, abstractions – asking, questioning, provoking and enhancing the sheer excitement and enjoyment of this 2 hour sensory extravaganza. Live vision mixer is Ricardo Lorenzini and LD is Andy Liddell. XL’s project manager is Des Fallen, who’s worked with the Chemicals Brothers for 8 years. The show is a liquid fusion of their two respective mediums, creating a unique molten visual energy and communication between band and audience. This year, XL is supplying a large 12 x 6 metre (2:1 ratio) upstage soft-screen, two side screens at 12 x 9 ft and four onstage LED screens constructed from 50 panels of Lighthouse 10 mm. The screen configurations are adaptable to suite the venue. The 250 sources are stored on 5 Doremi hard drives and one laptop. These are sent to the different destinations via a Leitch 16 x 16 matrix operated by XL’s Tim Brennan. He also sends the feeds to Lorenzini who cuts the screen mix using a Panasonic MX70. On selected songs Brennan also cuts the side screen and LED screen mix.
On two songs, there’s a lip-synch effect, created by taking a SMTPE feed from the backline into the Macintosh Dataton controller that’s running the fifth hard drive. This enables visual effects to be triggered by mouthed words and run simultaneously to the aural effect The large screen is fed by TWO Barco R18 projectors with image overlaid when front projected, boosted to three projectors when run in rear projection mode. The side screens are fed by two Barco G5s. Des Fallon states, “Another great Chemical Brothers show …. Brixton blew my head off!!!!” Lighting is being supplied by Hawthorne Theatrical, sound by Skan and lasers by Laser Magic and the tour is production managed by Angus Genner & tour managed by Stuart James. The show is scheduled to tour extensively around the globe for the rest of the year.
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