UK visual designer and video director Richard Stembridge was asked to present ideas for the influential and critically acclaimed Florence + The Machine’s live show video earlier this year, after they were impressed with his work on Arcade Fire.
He collaborated closely with Florence’s set and lighting designer Chris Bushell and together they evolved fresh, interesting live visuals for the show combining both mediums to great effect.
XL Video’s UK operation supplied a projection system, Catalyst media servers and control, cameras and crew for the band’s recent UK tour.
Stembridge had only a week to create the show’s video elements, which meant a lot of additions and extra support from XL whose tour project managers were Jo Beirne and Phil Mercer.
The flown set was 40ft wide and 16ft high. It comprised seven conjoined trapezoidal panels and was constructed by Hangman / Metalman from a frosted polycarbonate material. It resembled a series of large Art Deco style glass mirrors with a milky-white finish. These were carefully edged in chrome to allow them to be joined together to form the overall backdrop and split into tour-able sections.
The idea was to light the panels from behind, project onto them from the front or merge the two different types of illumination seamlessly.
Central to Stembridge’s aesthetic goal was for the projections to have their own mystique and sense of magic.
To fit the video – playback and IMAG – content precisely to the panels, Stembridge created highly accurate masking in the Catalyst.
The projectors were five Barco FLM R22s. Three fed the set / screens area and the other two projected on to the two left and right IMAG side screens.
These side screens were also specially shaped and angled to mimic the style and shape of the main set. Stembridge and Hangman / Metalman designed a lightweight frame to support these covered in a “Translight Midnight’ rear projection surface from Harkness, so they virtually disappeared when not in use.
The control system comprised three Catalyst v4 media servers operated via a Hog PC console.
Eight Sony robo-cams positioned all over the stage were fed into this, picking up the action, together with an operated broadcast quality camera at FOH with a 50mm lens focused on Florence Welch. All nine cameras were routed into the Catalyst system through an SDI matrix switcher and directed by Stembridge for the show.
Stembridge also created all the playback media. It was an open brief and he used imagery from previous and current albums (Lungs and Ceremonials) as his starting points for some clips, plus numerous other inspirations.
The set’s screen panels received camera and playback footage in various combinations, with projection for each of the seven set panels controlled individually using 11 Mix Windows and 32 Catalyst layers.
With the steep angle of the three front truss projectors, he applied a transparent background and a heavily keystoned Mix Window technique in the Catalyst to correct all the projected material. This avoided overspill between the surface areas across a single 1920 x 1080 output.
The video feed was distributed to three Folsom ImagePRO HD machines which were used to scale and position the output, ensuring that only the relevant portions of the output was sent to each of the three set projectors.
The keystoning of the Mix Windows was so extreme that the Catalyst layer keystone function could not un-stretch the content! Instead Stembridge created a custom After-Effects Project to reverse the keystoning on any of the content he made —before adding it to the Catalyst’s library.
This wasn’t possible for the camera shots. Instead he used a fusion of the Keystone function, scaling and X-Y-Z rotation on the camera layers to achieve the smallest possible amount of stretch, which fortuitously also fitted the overall look and design of the projection extremely well.
All of this careful planning and meticulous imaging combined to produce a distinctive, innovative and more provocative stage appearance that Stembridge and Bushell had originally aimed for.
