News

IL DIVO AT THE COLISEUM

Posted on 19/08/2011

Pop impresario Simon Cowell has put his name to many successes in his time, but few have sustained the kind of career that multi-national operatic vocal stars Il Divo have enjoyed since their formation in 2004.

With worldwide sales of 26 million albums to their credit, Il Divo — Spanish baritone Carlos Marín, Swiss tenor Urs Bühler, American tenor David Miller and French pop singer Sébastien Izambard — staged a brand new live spectacular over two nights at the iconic London Coliseum on August 1-2, featuring the Royal Philharmonic Concert Orchestra... with XL Video on-site to provide screens and content playback.

As XL project manager Paul ‘Macca’ McCauley explained, the set design incorporated three distinct, curved Pixled F11 LED screens that posed a challenge for the crew. “Our client insisted on minimising the amount of steel above the screens. Therefore, Mike Oates of [lighting & rigging supplier] HSL and I came up with a plan of hanging the single F11 tiles on curved trusses, under which we underhung some further trusses to support the outreaching staggered tiles without visible cabling.”

If this wasn’t a feat in itself, XL was also required to enable movement of all three screens during the show — an operation enabled by the Kinesys automation system provided by HSL. Said Macca: “I insisted on the trusses being braced to maintain the gap between them and hopefully keeping the screen intact. This took quite a bit of planning for just two shows but the end result was amazing.”
Macca liaised with Il Divo’s production manager Andy Proudfoot on all technical matters, while both the content and show design were handled by Alex Doss, stage manager Justin Mabardi and artistic director Brian Burke, known for his work on Céline Dion’s Las Vegas show, A New Day. Running on Catalyst servers, the content was mapped to ensure its flow through the two upstage screens and also the downstage screen.

The two shows — one of which was shot for DVD — followed the quartet’s recent 'An Evening With Il Divo' world tour which sold over 2,000,000 tickets and received Billboard’s Breakthrough Award for one of the biggest grossing tours of the year.

[URL=http://www.ildivo.com/uk/home]Il Divo website{/URL]