8 minute read
INFINITE NIGHTS: COLDPLAY LIVE AT EXPO 2020
TOM BAIRSTOW OF CREATIVE PRODUCTION COLLECTIVE, NORTHHOUSE EXPLAINS HOW XR PUSHED THE BOUNDARIES OF PRODUCTION DURING COLDPLAY’S INNOVATIVE AL WASL PLAZA PERFORMANCE.
The designers, directors, and visual artists at NorthHouse have collaborated with many incredible global names over the years, from Beyoncé to Bruno Mars, to Ferrari, BT, and even the Super Bowl. The collective are also longtime collaborators with Coldplay, first working with the band in 2015 for the A Head Full of Dreams Tour. “That campaign was an incredible experience and we have stayed in touch with the team ever since,” said NorthHouse’s Tom Bairstow, recalling the company’s history with the band and explaining how they came to work on Coldplay’s Expo 2020 performance.
“We were in contact with the Coldplay team during lockdown regarding the Music of the Spheres album. The Expo 2020 show was part of the band’s album promo shows, which NorthHouse has been a big part of, starting with a performance in the Roundhouse, London, in April 2021 and leading up to the Expo show.” As well as creating content for the upcoming world tour, NorthHouse had a two-pronged remit for the Expo 2020 project, which comprised 360° immersive visuals to be projected all around the gigantic Al Wasl dome during the performance, as well as a mixed reality promotional trailer to be released before the show.
“We jumped into both projects simultaneously, starting around October 2021,” Bairstow revealed. “It was important for us to
ensure that both elements synchronised nicely from an art direction point of view.” The mixed reality video was filmed at ARRI’s XR studio in West London, which opened in summer last year. “The ARRI / Creative Technology guys were incredibly helpful throughout the whole process,” he reported. “We sent a large crew and filmed the whole thing in just a couple of hours with the band. We’re very proud of the final product.”
The brief for the film was to simulate Coldplay performing in Al Wasl Plaza, creating the venue and projection content in the mixed reality world. “Just like a traditional film, we storyboarded it to begin with and built the scene up in 3D to help us visualise camera shots and create animatics. However, in tandem to that, there was a lot of technical research and development going into essentially building the venue in Unreal Engine,” Bairstow explained.
“We were given the dome structure as a 3D object, which we built into Unreal and built a whole scene around that. Then, we virtually projection-mapped it into the dome, so it resembled the concept for the real-life performance.” Of course, one of the benefits of mixed reality is that the creative is not constrained by the laws of physics present in the real world, so there was room for the imagination to run wild. “We pulled apart the video content into the three-dimensional space, which meant that rather than just projection mapping onto the dome, we stripped the assets and had all the content spread all over the area.”
The result was a Coldplay performance from a dreamy representation of Al Wasl Plaza, filled with rotating planets, swirling colours and surrounded by a glittering, starry night sky.
“It’s interesting when you dive into Unreal and move around the space in real time – it allows you to get a feel for the three-dimensional space,” added Bairstow. The performance area was also developed in virtual reality, which helped the NorthHouse team get a sense of what the real-world projection would look like before a site visit took place. “Being able to visualise the space in VR meant that we could see what we were creating and get a sense of scale, which is a difficult thing to do otherwise.” ‘CRAZY RESOLUTIONS’ While much of the art direction was already developed in preparation for Coldplay’s upcoming tour, everything had to be tailored and reformatted specifically to suit the unique architecture and massive scale of Al Wasl Plaza, with a projection area comprising some 80 million pixels in total, with 252 Christie D4K40 RGB laser DCI projectors and 16 disguise gx2 media servers all running in tandem. “This was the first time we had ever dealt with anything this size,” he admitted.
“Even though we had a bit of a head start on the art direction side of things, the fact that everything had to be created in such crazy resolutions meant it was a massive challenge. It was a colossal resolution to work with, and an incredible piece of architecture to design for.”
The NorthHouse team used a combination of Unreal Engine, Notch, Maxon Cinema 4D and Adobe After Effects. “We lent into Unreal and Notch a lot because they are real-time render engines and fast to work with,” Bairstow reported, adding that in the end, there’s no way of avoiding
NorthHouse Founder and Creative Director, Tom Bairstow.
the traditional After Effects workflow, which requires a time-consuming rendering process after every change. “It was a heavy process, but we’ve got some powerful kit in the studio, and we optimised all the processors to get through it.”
Bairstow and the NorthHouse team worked with Coldplay’s creative team, including Phil Harvey and Misty Buckley, Coldplay’s CoDirectors, before the visuals were ready to be brought to Dubai and tested in the real world. “Phil, Misty and the rest of the team are really great to work with and through many years of collaboration, we’ve built up a fantastic working relationship,” he said. “There’s always a lot of big ideas and many hours of work, but it’s a great process together and at the end, we get to create these incredible experiences all over the world.”
Bairstow was due to travel to Dubai, only to suffer a nasty mountain biking accident, dislocating his shoulder, and breaking four ribs. “I was in hospital for 10 days. It happened to coincide with the build-up to the XR shoot, so I had to do a lot of pre-production and direction from my hospital bed, which was interesting to say the least,” he recounted, recalling the numerous Zoom calls from his hospital bed to plan the shoot, before directing it while still in a sling and on slow-release morphine.
“We were trying to achieve something very technically complex, and my head was quite a mush due to the copious amounts of painkillers. It was quite an ordeal, but thankfully I had a brilliant XR team including Alice Ryland (Producer, NorthHouse), Emile Freeman (XR Co-Director, NorthHouse), Florian Lecoq (Lead Technical Artist, NorthHouse), Lydia Caplan (XR Lead Designer, NorthHouse), James Medcraft (DoP), Helen Dulay (Producer), Sam Seager (Warner / Coldplay), the brilliant ARRI team, the fantastic Warner Production team, lots of help from Coldplay’s Creative and Production teams, and many, many others,” he added. “The shoot couldn’t have gone any smoother in the end. We had such a small window of time with the band but nailed every shot and so much is down to such an incredible team effort under the circumstances.”
Thankfully, Bairstow made a speedy recovery, and he was eventually able to head to Dubai for more testing and rehearsals in January. “The rehearsals took place between four and six in the morning, which was the only time we could get in and ensure that nobody would be around,” he revealed. “It was so important that we made the best use of the architecture. Creative Technology did an amazing job of creating pixel maps of the dome, which were extremely accurate, allowing us to essentially break down the colossal structure into individual windows and pick out different segments, instead of having it as one huge projection canvas. The
Tom Bairstow, NorthHouse.
Expo team – especially Karl Knight, Kate Tooby and Lubna Haroun – were also phenomenal in helping us make sure we got the best out of the dome, creatively and technically.
“I’m so proud of what the NorthHouse team achieved with the live show and projection visuals,” he added. “Sean Bone (Projection Visuals Lead Artist), Alice Ryland (Producer) and then many artists pushed the boundaries of the architecture – Dan Richards, Florian Lecoq, Lydia Caplan, Emile Freeman, Dana Couling, Victor Scorrano, Luca Brenna, and Hasan Nasir.”
Reflecting on the project, Bairstow was pleased with the effects achieved using mixed reality. “It’s mind-blowing how you can create complex environments from scratch in such a short period of time,” he pondered. “It was interesting to work in two different worlds at the same time. Navigating between the real world and the extended reality world was a challenge, but one fed into the other and we borrowed a lot of techniques and design assets from both sides. Both disciplines helped each other.”
However, for him, nothing could beat the buzz of show night. “The film of the show – which was put together by Paul Dugdale and Simon Fisher – was fantastic, but nothing can compare to the energy inside the dome when Coldplay were performing live. It was amazing,” he said.
“It was a fully immersive show that combined elements of an Olympic-scale ceremony with the feeling that you were fully consumed by 360° visuals. It was an incredible experience to feel the energy within the dome that night – something I’ll never forget.” The project represented a first taste of working in the region for NorthHouse and, according to Bairstow, it has certainly whetted the appetite. “Our team is certainly growing at the moment and we’re always interested in exploring other areas of the world for great projects. Dubai and the Middle East in general have so much going on with new tech and experiences and we’d love to do a lot more out there,” he concluded.
“For now, though, we’ve got the Coldplay World Tour to finalise and a very British celebration of the Queen, where we’re designing a very special show at Buckingham Palace to celebrate the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee.” Photos: Expo 2020 www.coldplay.com www.northhousecreative.com
