By Jon Silberg, October 15, 2008
Concert audiences for the world's top acts are paying significantly more for tickets than ever before, and they demand a lot of show for their money. Naturally, they expect the acts to work hard to entertain, but as a rule the giant stadium and arena performances also provide high-end video on a lot of very large screens to ensure that there's no place in the venue an audience member could look without seeing something cool. Madonna's Sticky & Sweet tour is certainly no exception. As the Material Girl performs with her backup musicians and dancers, Video Engineer Jason Harvey of Short & Spikey continues to keep some 17 giant video screens filled with exciting images.
Harvey, who has done the same for tours by Van Halen, Cher, Bon Jovi and Christina Aguilera, among others, describes the kinds of images audiences at Madonna's shows see. "We start off with a 3D animation of a train with graffiti on it showing the words of the song the artist is singing," he explains. "Then there are many different video presentations made by a number of different people, including Christian Lamb, the video director of the show itself. There is also a lot of giant candy and sweets that fly around the screens. We have some wonderful material shot with the [Vision Research] Phantom HD camera at 1,000 frames per second—things like water droplets splashing into one another. It looks amazing. There is a 3D render of Madonna inside a hand-drawn animated world that has a wonderful kind of old-school meets new-school technique."
Expectations, says Harvey, are very high for these presentations. He and his team use Adobe CS3 Production Premium to prepare the video. The MBox EXtreme media server from PRG (Production Resources Group) allows Harvey to store all the 1920x1080 30p pieces and have complete random access control of these streams of high-def video on a variety of large LEDs, including V-9 and V-Lite screens from Nocturne Productions and Stealth Displays from Element Labs.
"It used to be people would just say, 'Let's make a really big picture,'" Harvey says. "It was low-res, but if you're 100 feet away, it kind of looked okay. If you were closer to these JumboTrons, you could see the individual red, green and blue pixels. That was acceptable, but now we're all immersed in Blu-ray and HD broadcasts and everyone's got a flat panel at home and we're used to seeing things in more detail. You just can't sell a VHS image on a big screen. High-paying audiences expect a high-quality product."
A key element to being able to create and present these shows, Harvey notes, is the flexibility to quickly augment what gets put up on the screens—to edit and re-render—especially during the period that the show takes form. Harvey's team has an Apple Mac Pro and two HP PCs, all of which run Adobe's CS3 suite. These workstations allow him a lot of freedom to prepare the individual video elements and tailor them to the specs of their respective screens. He finds a lot of use during the rehearsal period, when the show actually comes together, for Premiere to edit and After Effects as a compositing tool.
Madonna will generally begin rehearsals about five months before the first show. She works with Jamie King, the creative director of the tour, and dancers and designers and the rest of her team. "First," Harvey explains, "they work out the music and dancing and set design. Then, four months out, they start coming up with ideas for video content. Concepts go out to a number of studios, and they suggest ideas and work on the content. Then the real crunch time is about two months out, when that content starts to show up and they can start rehearsing on stage with the video screens and all the props.
"The show is huge," he continues, "but they build it component by component. If they want a video screen to track up and down, they get the motors and chains to do that. There is a car onstage for part of the show, and this is when people figure out how to get it on and off and what else is going on while that happens. They also decide exactly how long particular pieces of content need to be, and they make decisions about the material that's started coming in from the production houses."
This is also when Harvey begins working with the video clips. Some come as separate streams designated for certain screens, while others need to be edited or rasterized. "Imagine 17 cookies being cut out of one sheet," Harvey describes. "That's what we do in After Effects or Premiere or Final Cut Pro. We've found that After Effects is particularly good at chopping the blocks up and organizing them because it's a compositing software."
At this point, by the nature of the way the show comes together, there are still tweaks and changes to the presentation as the set list changes or a dance number gets cut down.
"There was a situation where there were three versions of particular video submitted," Harvey recalls. "The artist liked the beginning of one, the middle of another and the end of the third. The studio that made it was in Los Angeles and we were doing our rehearsals in the UK. If they edited there and then we had to download a 5GB file over the Internet, it would have taken us a whole day. But we had the master files and so we could re-edit on site and play back with the audio directly off the timeline from Premiere. We'd render that into the QuickTime file format we needed for the file server and she could see the re-edited version at that night's rehearsal. That kind of process would keep happening through those last weeks of run-through. Having three edit suites on site meant we could work with three individual projects at the same time and render them out and onto the media server very efficiently."
And then, as the tour gets underway, issues occasionally come up that require additional tweaking. "It might turn out that there isn't enough time to do a set change so we need to fill ten seconds here, or you find you can't break this prop down as quickly in that arena so you need 15 seconds there," he says. "When the audience is there, the show has to always be fluid and interesting. There can be no mistakes."
To that end, everything in his playback system is 100 percent redundant. "There is always an A system and a B system, so we can switch over immediately if there's any trouble," Harvey says. "We run the whole system on an extremely large UPS [uninterruptible power supply], so we can hold our power for up to 30 minutes, no matter what happens."
While the dance routines and lighting and costume changes and set design must be timed to the second—the smallest change affects an army of performers and technicians and an array of some enormous props—everyone including Harvey must still be prepared for changes. Whether Madonna herself decides to chat with the audience for a moment or a motor fails to pull a giant screen to its mark, everyone needs to be on the ball. "Most of the video playback is controlled manually," Harvey notes. "If something unexpected happens or we have a technical fault, we have to control it to make it look correct. We're putting on a live performance every night."
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