News

JAMES BLUNT’S REGIMENTED ELEGANCE

Posted on 09/11/2011

XL Video has been supporting James Blunt’s Some Kind Of Trouble tour with crew and equipment since it began this February in the UK, wowing audiences with its creative deployment of 172 Stealth tiles. After further legs in North America and Europe, it came to a close in Geneva on October 31 and I-Mag director Jon Shrimpton was able to fill us in on some of the design detail.

“It was the kind of production that we’ve come to expect from Paul Normandale who is a formidable show designer and it was clever how he achieved a very potent, sizeable look from what wasn’t an enormous amount of kit by arena standards,” said Shrimpton.

“At the back of the stage we had six columns of Stealth with a wall of Stealth panels around and in front of the band risers, all of which were carefully pixel mapped to appear as one image across the whole stage. They were all rigged and ‘tickled’ by Patrick van Steelen, our screen technician who spent most of the last two years on the road with U2, and engineered by the very knowledgable John Steele.

“I came on board to direct the I-Mag for the side screens over the final four weeks in Europe with my favourite Grass Valley Kayak desk, cutting three Sony D-50 cameras in the usual configuration of one at FOH and two in the pit, plus two Sony BRC-300 Robocams on stage and a Toshiba Minicam focused on keyboard player Paul Beard. The projectors were a pair of Barco SLM R12+s, rear-projecting on to Stumpf 16’ x 12’ screens.

“The style of cut for the I-Mag was quite clean and elegant in all the right places, and bereft of the effects like colourising and other weirdness that I might use for other artists. It just didn’t suit the music, which I’ve grown to like as well as the artist himself who is a surprisingly funny chap. His shows are very entertaining but quite regimented in the way that he’ll play the same set list every night and it’s all very precise. We’ll know in advance that on a particular beat of a bar in one song, he will be standing in a certain position with the same look on his face at every show. Perhaps that precision has some connection with his military background.”

Content for around nine songs was produced by filmmaker/photographer Judy Jacob (Kings Of Leon, Peter Gabriel, Paul Weller) while other material was sourced from existing promo videos and images found by Blunt.

“The pieces that Judy made were very interesting,” commented Shrimpton. “The film of the animated VU meters was set in time with the song ‘Superstar’, providing what I think was one of the more dynamic looks. Glen Johnson, the lighting director and production manager who I know from the Scissor Sisters’ tours, was operating the content side of the video from FOH with all of the material stored on a Catalyst media server.”

The tour was project managed for XL Video by “the lovely and ever helpful” Jo Beirne. Immediately upon returning home from the last gig at Geneva Arena, Shrimpton headed straight for XL’s Hemel Hempstead HQ to programme for a weekend of gigs by Elbow, his other main current client.

“Working with Elbow is a completely different experience to working with James Blunt because Guy Garvey loves to improvise,” said Shrimpton, “and that diversity is one of the great things about this business. They say variety is the spice of life and it’s certainly true of the life of a touring video director!”

Photography © Judy Jacob

[URL=http://www.jamesblunt.com]James Blunt website{/URL]