The UK-based artistic design firm, Oli Metcalfe Design Ltd working with
entertainment studio, Moment Factory applied an unprecedented combination of
interactive technology for the worldwide arena tours of British rock trio, Muse and
their new album Drones, their seventh studio record.
Muse made history on Friday, 15 April 2016 when they played to a record-breaking
21,000 fans at The O2 Arena, London.
The Drones tour combines tracking, lighting, videos, flying elements and a lot of
creativity, to create visuals and spontaneous interactivity never seen before in a
liverock concert like this one.
BlackTrax real-time motion tracking solution from CAST BlackTrax Ltd is used to
track and manage three technical elements, from band members to massive drones
that fly above the audience as well as for projection-based storytelling. The area
tracked is BlackTrax’s largest to date!
Drones warns of Orwellian dangers and choices in modern life threatening to turn
people into robots. Somewhat Sci-Fi, the audience revolts and takes a thrilling
journey musically and visually.
The stage set splits the arena floor in half, creating a theatre in the round
experience, and focus on a large drone-like structure. As the concert starts, twelve
clear spherical drones with glowing lights float down above the band. Then, four
drones each are launched, from the North and South platforms above the stage,
with two drones each being launched from East and West platforms above the
stage.
During the show, larger “Reaper’ aircraft-like drones with glowing LEDs are launched
into the audience and are tracked alongside lighting fixtures while flying through the
arena. All drones in the production are completely autonomous.
In total, thirty-eight BlackTrax cameras are used for tracking of drones and
performers. The tracking system includes fourteen drone trackables and three artist
trackables. The system runs on an active server with backup / slave system and
integrates with twenty-four Mac Viper Air FX, and six Clay Paky Mythos lighting
fixtures. Positional information is sent to Barco’s XPR media servers, which manage
content across twelve Barco HDF-W30 FLEX projectors. Each projector is fitted with
custom-made moving mirrors to focus on either the 200 square meters of projection
voile or to be used as area effects around the arena.
Fourteen BlackTrax cameras are positioned in the roof structure of each arena,
focused on performance areas and audience. Twenty-four BlackTrax cameras are
mounted onto the Muse stage structure andrigged for purposes either covering the
stage, or out into the audience.
Each drone is piloted by the Dutch company Path65 and their proprietary motion
control system, which performs remote control the drones through a predesigned
flight path. BlackTrax is also used to send the drones positional data in real-time to
Path65’s controller system and warns it in case a wind gust moves the drones away
from the flight path or if there is a potential risk of collision.
The Drones tour combines tracking, lighting, videos, flying elements and a lot of
creativity, to create visuals and spontaneous interactivity never seen before in a
liverock concert like this one.
