disguise solutions power innovative video for Ariana Grande's Sweetener World Tour

disguise solutions power innovative video for Ariana Grande's Sweetener World Tour posted: 16/10/2019

Ariana Grande's Sweetener World Tour is underway with disguise 4x4pro media servers and OmniCal projector-calibration engine playing a key role in facilitating the ethereal, galaxy-themed visuals on stage.

The tour supports the artist's fourth and fifth studio albums, sweetener' and thank u, next.' It kicked off in March 2019 in New York and wraps in December 2019 in California, comprising three legs and a total of 102 dates in North America and Europe.

The tour was designed to highlight the range and femininity of Ariana and create an ever-transforming space for her to perform her latest albums and give the audience an immersive experience to dive into as they witness Arianas journey through her music, says Loren Barton, Media Department Director with Lumentech. He has overseen the projection and media departments in support of many recent projects by Production and Lighting Designer LeRoy Bennett. Possible Productions produced the motion graphics for the show, which sees the stage brought to life with visuals of space during the song NASA', the visuals then turn the stage into a planet, a moon and a galaxy. From conversations with Ariana herself, Michael Figge and his team at Possible created a stage theme for each song that reinforced the choreography and lighting.

The set is made up of three main features: an inflatable curved cyc wall with a protruding hemisphere in the centre, a horseshoe-shaped wrap-around runway, and a descending sphere that inflates fully when deployed, Loren explains. Unlike most pop tours, the decision was made early on to use projection as a light and scenic source for the show and have the lighting accent the music, key the dancers, as well as sculpt and feature Ariana with follow spots, balanced to much lower levels than traditional follow spots. Another key decision was to project onto the stage floor so that no matter what seat you have in the arena, the visuals and imagery of the show reach you and contribute to your experience of the production. The whole set is a canvas.

Loren notes that the set design was adapted several times to meet the needs of the production before it was finalised. The usual challenges of balancing the spatial needs of scenic, audio, lighting and projection took some re-configuring on-site once we had all of the pieces in the room together. Projectors and trusses needed to be moved as the final positions were chosen for the set.

The biggest challenge we faced was getting all 30 of the scenic projectors rigged, cabled, focused and calibrated on the three different scenic elements within a standard one day load-in time frame. The tight rehearsal time period meant we only had the entire set in one place for about a week. A great deal of research and development to manage the warping and calibration had yet to be completed. As a precaution, we had the inflatable vendor sew in a grid of small markers just below the surface of the objects to be used in our calibrations.

Once it was apparent that a large part of the scenic design revolved around projecting on 3D inflatable objects, OmniCal cropped up in conversations, making this the first concert tour that it had been used on this scale. disguise 4x4pro media servers along with OmniCal were chosen as the best solution for the show's complex scenic design. John Wiseman and Nick Jackson of PRG LA supplied the disguise and video equipment for the tour.

Given the short time we had to come up with a tourable calibration plan for these complex scenic objects, disguise's new OmniCal solution was the best way for us to move forward, Loren declared The entire team is used to the disguise workflow, and we felt confident that we could deliver a repeatable, reliable and robust system that would allow the show to travel around the world.

In addition to the equipment and software, we also considered the people. We were incredibly lucky to have the leadership and insights from two of the top disguise engineers Ben Keightley and Zak Haywood as we embarked on this journey. Together we could not have pulled this off without the dedicated support of disguise developers and engineers. We all learned a great deal on this project about what it takes to really prove a new product and bring it to market, doing the final stages of testing in a live environment. Im proud of what we accomplished together through all the challenges and celebrating our successes.

Our project required two 8-camera machine vision systems working together to calibrate our three surfaces and connected to the same 10G network being fed into the disguise machines for processing, he explains. This relied on a significant network backbone high above the arena and the ability to focus cameras accurately without being able to reach them.

Our first order of business was to devise an OmniCal plan for our curved hemisphere wall object, Loren explains. For the entire show, this wall provides the backdrop and sets the tone for each song so it was our most crucial surface. The sphere was hit with an array of six projectors to give us all the angles we needed to cover the nooks and crannies of this irregular object.

The next scenic system we were going to work on was the sprawling horseshoe stage deck that wraps around the VIP pit and back to the main stage. This object has some relief but is primarily a flat, custom decking system provided by Tait. We did several tests with cameras in various positions and elevations, testing different calibration settings and adding and removing cameras to our calibration plan.

We opted to utilise the natural seams between the decks and project the decking CAD plan back onto the decks to use as a lineup template and we eventually de

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