XL Video Push The Button For The Chemical Brothers



Apr 4, 2005 1:10 PM





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XL Video is again supplying full video production to the Chemical Brothers current Push The Button tour. The Chemical?s visuals have always been cutting edge, working seamlessly into their dance beats?and this is no exception.



The original video source material, over 250 scenes in all, is created and compiled by Adam Smith, who?s been involved with the band for many years. The images are a composition of colors, insects, animals, plants, robots, politics, history, and abstract shapes?asking, questioning, provoking, and enhancing the excitement of the two-hour show. The band stands in ephemeral shadows and silhouettes onstage, ensconced behind racks of knobs, digits, and codes, creating beautiful noise while letting the visuals narrate the music.







Ricardo Lorenzini is the live vision mixer and Andy Liddell is LD for the show. XL?s project manager is Des Fallen, who?s worked with the Chemicals Brothers for eight years.



This year, XL is supplying a large 12x6m (2:1 ratio) upstage soft-screen, two side screens at 12?x9?, and four onstage LED screens constructed from 50 panels of Lighthouse 10mm. The screen configurations are adaptable to suit the venue. Two Barco R18 projectors feed the large screen with image overlaid when front projected, when run in rear projection mode it is boosted to three projectors. Two Barco G5s project to the side screens.







The 250 image sources are stored on five Doremi hard drives and one laptop. They are sent to the different projection destinations via a Leitch 16x16 matrix, operated by XL?s Tim Brennan. He also sends the feeds to Lorenzini who cuts the screen mix using a Panasonic MX70. On select songs, Brennan also cuts the side screen and LED screen mix. The fifth hard drive utilizes a WinAmp plug-in, which takes a feed off of the sound desk to produce specific effects, like the oscilloscope-style green wavelength modulations that bounce across the LED screens.



For two songs a lip-synch effect, created by taking a SMTPE feed from the backline into a Macintosh Dataton controller, enables visual effects to be triggered by mouthed words and run simultaneously with the aural effect.



Lighting is being supplied by Hawthorne Theatrical, sound by Skan, and lasers by Laser Magic. The tour is production managed by Angus Genner and tour managed by Stuart James. The show is scheduled to tour around the globe for the rest of the year.

For two songs a lip-synch effect, created by taking a SMTPE feed from the backline into a Macintosh Dataton controller, enables visual effects to be triggered by mouthed words and run simultaneously with the aural effect.

not sure if I understood well, but that's for Come Inside and Electronic Battle Weapon 7, right? Always wondered how they could sync the visuals and the lyrics.

cool article, they got some cool images on their web site!



http://www.xlvideo.c...38fa7407fec.jpg

http://www.xlvideo.c...f887c02632d.jpg

http://www.xlvideo.c...b25abec74bd.jpg

i am a cunt!











found a few more too!!

Ah, this is friggen great to read!!! Thanks for this!



I've always found the behind-the-scenes stuff fascinating, love watching the set up and tear down of a gig. It would be amazing to have the opportunity to watch the people behind the lights and visualizations during a gig, just to observe how everything falls into place once the music starts.

A very interesting read! Thanks for that and the links too!

whirlygirl Escribi�:

Ah, this is friggen great to read!!! Thanks for this!



I've always found the behind-the-scenes stuff fascinating, love watching the set up and tear down of a gig. It would be amazing to have the opportunity to watch the people behind the lights and visualizations during a gig, just to observe how everything falls into place once the music starts.

Something for the live DVD pherhaps? It would really interesting actually...

egil Escribi�:

whirlygirl Escribi�:

Ah, this is friggen great to read!!! Thanks for this!



I've always found the behind-the-scenes stuff fascinating, love watching the set up and tear down of a gig. It would be amazing to have the opportunity to watch the people behind the lights and visualizations during a gig, just to observe how everything falls into place once the music starts.

Something for the live DVD pherhaps? It would really interesting actually...

Oh yes, absolutely!! It would be awesome to have special features where some of this stuff is explained and demonstrated by the people behind the scenes. By showing how it's all pulled off each and every gig would give a person a more intimate view of everything that goes into making a Chemical Brothers show.



But on the other hand, the final impact - like what we see when we're in the audience - is a part of the allure and magic and mystery to the whole experience. A magician never gives away his secrets! ;)

That would be cool :o I would like to know in normal-people language ( as in , i dont know what all this technical stuff means ) how the synchronize the visuals and the music , and i would like to know how much this fucking big screens cost mehehehe.

Cheers irish and sneaker, that stuff is fascinating.



Anyone know if these guys are in any way related to vegetable vision who did a lot of underworld's design and imagery?

tomato do all underworlds visuals. vegetable do chems, the streets and others

found this cool live image

this site talks about the exploding tea pot

http://www.artem.com...ctId=Tea%20Pots

irish fan Escribi�:

tomato do all underworlds visuals. vegetable do chems, the streets and others

you say tomato, i say.... vegetable! whoops! easy mistake to make! :-//

Godammit I MUST see them live!!!

irish fan Escribi�:

found this cool live image

"live" is not really the world to this... i would say "playback", except for the singer. Where the hell is the guitar in the golden path?

If you watch the "live" footage of the Chems with the Flaming Lips (that's Wayne Coyne, the singer) then you'll be able to tell which are the guitar parts, and then you'll be able to hear them with more clarity when you listen to he Golden Path. It's a very simple, repetitive guitar line - nothing too fancy.



I thought it was cute seeing Tom up there with a guitar. It was a bit out of his element but I think he pulled it off and he appeared quite natural. It was a first - but I wonder if he'll eventually pick up a guitar again for a live show in the future?

That Golden Path performance in Edinburgh was a really cool made-for-TV performance and just had a great, happy feel about it.



It'd be cool to see tom & Ed put together a band.

Still need to see that video...it looks so funny to see Tom with a guitar X-D

Wondeful article, it was curious to see how they linked up the vocals to the animated mouth movements. It was also interesting to read how the projections worked, sometimes from the front and the back and all the different types of screens. Also, I liked the idea of displaying a winamp visual plug-in onscreen, a lot like the visuals you can use in software media players, I think they did the oscilloscope thing for gyh. Maybe on the dvd we could hear from the team themselves and a bit about how they form/film the visuals. It would be good to hear some info from their point of view.