Worldwide collaboration for Keith Urban shoots
- Details
Big Picture’s flexibility and technical prowess recently led to a mammoth two-day shoot with country superstar Keith Urban. Keith’s production house Human Person approached Big Picture to facilitate and coordinate the ambitious project.
Keith recently launched a new album The Speed of Now Part 1 and he was keen to produce a bunch of different performance videos, shot at the same time, for various television shows. These shows included Good Morning America, Seth Meyers, The Tonight Show and iHeartRadio Music Festival 2020.
With key creative personnel located all over the world, this was always going to be an interesting remote collaboration. Human Person, headed by Ben Dalgleish, provided both lighting and production design, called the shots from New Zealand. The lighting was programmed by Nick van Nostrand in Toronto, Canada, and content creation was coming from Hamilton, Canada, Hong Kong and the Human Person studio in Los Angeles.
“It was great to collaborate with Ben and the wider Keith Urban Team,” commented Josh Moffat, special projects & business development at Big Picture. “Our studio’s leading technology resources allowed significant flexibility to service the creative requirements of Ben’s design whilst keeping variety between different looks.”
Although each performance was different, there were a few consistencies such as LED screens and a strong floor lighting package. The background LED package was high-resolution ROE Black Onyx 2.8mm LED screen and there was an LED ceiling element comprising of ROE CB5 both running Brompton processing, reconfigured for a variety of setups for different tracks. Vision was all running off disguise gx2c media servers.
One of the most creative outcomes was for the song Superman where 16 competition winners, who each won the chance to play the guitar on the track, had to be incorporated into the production design.
“We decided to use augmented reality and we bought in a Stype camera kit,” added Ben. “Essentially, we had Stype RedSpy optical tracking on a camera jib and we added in a virtual carousel of the contest winners above Keith. It was an excellent way of incorporating what was iPhone footage in a unique way.”
For the song Forever, there was a new LED design incorporating an overhead ceiling and adjoining columns creating a proscenium arch of LED as well as the background screen. This enabled Keith to occasionally be entirely lit by the LED content resulting in some unique looks.
In the studio, the 4K UHD broadcast camera system, based around a Ross Carbonite Ultra and Ultrix backbone, supported capture from Panasonic AK-UC4000 camera chains with Fujinon ultra high definition camera lensing. Riedel Artist and Bolero Intercom systems were implemented.
Human Person designed the lighting for Keith’s Las Vegas residency at Caesar’s Palace and elements of that show transferred to the set up in the Big Picture studio. With a very similar floor package, the Vegas programming for certain songs could be used which was a great head start. Big Picture collaborated with SWS to provide the full lighting solution with lighting direction on set handled by Josh Moffat on an MA Lighting grandMA2 full-size.
The strong floor package allowed for the successful interplay between the lighting and the video content. This package included GLP X4 Bars, GLP JDC-1, Ayrton Magic Blade and Ayrton Mistral S. Also in the rig were Martin MAC Aura XB, ProLights ECL Panel, GLP GT-1, Ayrton Bora, Martin Atomic Dot, Chauvet Nexus AW7x7 Panel, Claypaky Sharpy and B-Eye K20.
