Designed by show designer Vince Foster, with visual content created by Paul Caslin, the widescreen style set comprised three portrait-hung LED Screens upstage, while the curvaceous set was visually sculpted using 600 horizontally positioned BARCO MiStrips.
The content featured a mix of pre-recorded content and live camera feeds mixed by vision director Steven Price, all powered by Avolites' industry-leading Ai Infinity 8 Server with 8 Full HD outputs.
Video specialists Creative Technology supplied the Avolites intelligent video mapping technology along with the LED screens, MiStrips and the technical team to run it.
“What made the Ai media server particularly helpful for this project was the 3D visualizer,” says Creative Technology’s director of business development, Adrian Offord. “This allowed our programmers to show Jessie J’s creative team exactly how their content would work in the real world. For two weeks prior to rehearsals Creative Technology’s Will Harkin and Rob Currie, in association with consultant video programmer Nick Clark-Lowe, created innumerable, multi-dimensional video and lighting looks across the set from a single image layer. The content was then timecoded and the Ai Server proved the ideal platform for this.”
Jamie Thompson, on tour technician for Creative Technology, adds. “Once we got out on tour we needed a robust system that didn’t necessarily need a dedicated technician to run it. What’s great about the Ai Media Server is that you can easily link the servers to the video desk, lighting desk and midi controllers and leave it to run.”
During the show, each piece of pre-recorded content was triggered in Ai by time-code. In addition Foster could take control the output level of the video and he could also bring up a second layer of content, such as block colour, for the transitions between songs.
As well as the pre-recorded media content, four cameras provided ‘live’ camera feeds to two I-Mags either side of the stage.The system has been configured to take advantage of the Ai server’s extremely low latency which was of the utmost importance to director Steve Price.
The Ai server is designed to offer both pre-sequenced and live control, which enables the operator to seamlessly mix between a timecoded show and live performance, which was a fundamental part of this show.