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BlackTrax flies high for Muse on its Drones worldwide arena concerts

Muse made history on Friday, 15 April 2016 when they played to a record-breaking 21,000 fans at The O2 Arena, London.

The UK-based artistic design firm, Oli Metcalfe Design Ltd working with entertainment studio, Moment Factory applied an unprecedented combination of interactive technology for the worldwide arena tours of British rock trio, Muse and their new album Drones, their seventh studio record.

The Drones tour combines tracking, lighting, videos, flying elements and a lot of creativity, to create visuals and spontaneous interactivity never seen before in a liverock concert like this one. BlackTrax real-time motion tracking solution from CAST BlackTrax Ltd is used to track and manage three technical elements, from band members to massive drones that fly above the audience as well as for projection-based storytelling. The area tracked is BlackTrax’s largest to date.

Drones warns of Orwellian dangers and choices in modern life threatening to turn people into robots. Somewhat Sci-Fi, the audience revolts and takes a thrilling journey musically and visually. “We’ve worked with Muse for sixteen years and push pioneering technology to its limits at each arena, in front of around 24,000 people each time,” says Oli Metcalfe who also designs lighting and stage concepts for a number of international artists.

Drones took a year to design and test,” adds Metcalfe. “We conduct a laser scan of each venue and created workflows of video, lighting, and actors using wysiwyg lightingdesign and previsualization software. This gave us accurate data for placement of BlackTrax tracking cameras showing how the system would work before we even got there. Running BlackTrax with wysiwyg is critical.

The stage set splits the arena floor in half, creating a theatre in the round experience, and focus on a large drone-like structure. As the concert starts, twelve clear spherical drones with glowing lights float down above the band. Then, four drones each are launched, from the North and South platforms above the stage, with two drones each being launched from East and West platforms above the stage.

During the show, larger ‘Reaper’ aircraft-like drones with glowing LEDs are launched into the audience and are tracked alongside lighting fixtures while flying through the arena. All drones in the production are completely autonomous.

A large, cylindrical LED video screen is hung at centre. Content is managed using Catalyst media servers, and within it LED video strips come cascading out. The large LED wall comprises 85 squaremeters and is used for content as well as IMAG camera shots. In addition to the wall, semi-transparent projection screens (voiles) run all the way through the North and South sections of the stage in the middle of each catwalk, which rolls in from above as needed. These voiles also form a cylindrical column around the main center stage. Here a holographic video effect is created using a hidden projection surface.

 

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