Knight of Illumination award-winning video designer Ben Miles has praised the
Avolites Ai R6 media servers in their performance for festival opener Coldplay at the
star-studded Global Citizen Festival in Hamburg, Germany, ahead of the annual G20
Summit.
The Festival calls on governments and the private sector to increase support and
funding of issues associated with extreme poverty. This year was the first time the
event had been held in Europe – and featured performances by world-renowned
superstars including Pharrell Williams, Shakira, Ellie Goulding, German superstars
Herbert Gronemeyer and Andreas Bourani – all opened by multi-million selling British
band Coldplay.
Miles, who has been responsible for Coldplay’s stunning visuals throughout the band’s
A Head Full of Dreams tour, comments, “Coldplay has so many ‘big hits’ it’s difficult
for us to know which of them they will play at festivals and shows like this. We knew
they would play five or six songs in their set, but we didn’t know which ones, so we
had to prepare for pretty much any of them. This meant we had to use our existing
touring system but integrated into the Global Citizen show design. To do this, we were
able to work with the Global Citizen production team to use their LED mapping with
our outputs.”
Adapting the current Coldplay touring system’s Ai outputs to the entirely different
screen configuration in use at Global Citizen could have been a significant challenge
for Miles and his team, as he explains. “Instead of outputting to our usual LED
processors, we had to reallocate all our outputs from the tour set-up. So, it meant a
lot of remapping of the outputs!”
Happily, the Ai’s advanced functions allowed for a painless solution, as Miles explains,
“The Global Citizen team provided us with their LED map, and Video Programmer
Robin Haddow and Systems Engineer Owen Evans worked together to use the Ai’s
output functions to map all the LED sections to the outputs. They used quite a
complex map to manage all the LED into five outputs, which takes a lot of pixel
calculations and mapping of multiple sections. It was really easy in Ai, as the output
function is user-friendly. You can label the sections and pick them from a drop-down
menu to help you work everything out, and then return to it to make edits.”
The Global Citizen rig also featured Barco MiStrip LED battens on the edges of the
side-screens. “Once all the remapping was done in Ai, it was really easy to remap the
content from our tour LED floor setup to the MiStrips and try out different positions
and configurations to find what worked best,” says Miles.
To create the show’s realtime interactive video content Miles utilised the Ai’s Notch
function. He explains: “Many of the effects we use in our show are made using Notch
integrated into AI. With all the real-time exposed parameters it meant we could vary
the parameters to work with the Global Citizen screens and keep all the areas of
interest in the main camera view.”
The Global Citizen Festival Hamburg comes during Coldplay’s A Head Full of Dreams
tour, which has been travelling the globe with huge success since March 2016, with
over a hundred shows already performed. As usual, touring high-tech equipment
between wildly different and often extreme climates brings its own challenges.
“We’ve had some challenging environments in terms of humidity and temperature,”
says Miles. “When we were touring in Asia, all of the equipment was put under
immense pressure with the temperatures. The servers fared well with their front-to-
back cooling system. They performed well, and we never missed a beat.”
Miles also related how certain elements of the video team’s practices have evolved
over time as the tour has progressed. “We have reallocated some of the resources
amongst the servers,” he reveals. “Some of the real-time generated content we use in
the show is now recorded and reloaded to the servers as a video clip. The content is
made using Ai effects, but by recording it and then playing it back as a video clip, we
can reapply the Ai effects, giving us further options and effect possibilities and freeing
up further resources for other effects.”
Having recently completed its 21-date European leg, Coldplay’s A Head Full of Dreams
tour will continue in August, making its way through North America and South
America until mid-November.
The Global Citizen Festival is an annual music festival founded in 2012. The movement
seeks to end extreme poverty by 2030. In 2015, Chris Martin, lead vocalist for
Coldplay, made a 15-year commitment to the movement to be music curator for the
event.
