ouizy
Rock n' Roll Doggie
Not much new to gleam for us tech geeks, but a nice piece altogether (really gives him his due credit whereby WW usually gets it all for 360):
Creating: Mark Fisher, Concert Designer - WSJ.com
From the inflatable nuclear family floating over Pink Floyd audiences in 1977 to the arachnoid structure dominating U2's current megatour, Mark Fisher designs stage sets for music's elite, and his portfolio traces the evolution of the rock concert spectacle. He flanked the Rolling Stones's stage with tiered balconies, swooped Tina Turner over her audience with a 60-foot mechanical arm and sent a snorting locomotive into AC/DC's midst.
The architect has also increasingly branched out into other forms of what he calls "entertainment architecture," especially sports galas. A Brit, he was one of the only Westerners to work with Zhang Yimou on the ceremonies for Beijing's 2008 Olympics—his contributions included the glowing sphere, 60 feet in diameter, on which dancers seemed to defy gravity—and he's an executive producer of the ceremonies for the 2012 Olympics in London. He created a bulbous, helium-filled projection screen for the Commonwealth Games scheduled to start Oct. 3, and an island made to look like a ship for November's Asian Games in China.
[creating0924] François Dischinger for The Wall Street Journal
Mark Fisher
THE WIZARD OF ROCK
* Mark Fisher created the glowing sphere, 60 feet in diameter, on which dancers seemed to defy gravity for Beijing's 2008 Olympics.
* • He uses hardback sketchbooks that are custom bound in London and has used the same Souverän M800 model Pelikan fountain pen for about 20 years.
* • The stage now being used in U2's "360°" tour was inspired by the Theme building in Los Angeles, the futuristic designs of a '60s art collective and Mr. Fisher's own experiences working at a sewing machine.
* • Roger Waters's remake of Pink Floyd's "The Wall" uses 15 digital video projectors to splash a 245- foot-wide wall with images of falling bombs or the original cartoons of Gerald Scarfe.
Earlier this month, Mr. Fisher sat among a sea of empty seats in a darkened arena near Newark, N.J., watching former Pink Floyd singer Roger Waters lead his band through a rehearsal of "The Wall." Three decades ago, Mr. Fisher helped Pink Floyd bring its dark concept album to the stage by erecting a stark white wall in front of the band and splashing grotesque cartoons on it using 35mm film projectors. Now, the rebuilt Roger Waters show is on the road, updated with precision video projectors that can beam portraits of war victims onto each brick.
View Slideshow
[SB10001424052748703499604575512771598979384]
Revisiting this project reminded Mr. Fisher of how much the technology and budgets of stagecraft have changed, even as its purpose and his goals remain the same. "It has to do with the way a rock show is a sort of tribal event in our culture," he says. "It's preparing everyone for the arrival of the high priest."
The architect uses hardback sketchbooks that have been custom bound by Shepherds Bookbinders in London for his firm, Stufish, since his last supplier switched to inferior paper stock. The paper in his custom sketchbooks, ordered 50 at a time for about $20 each, is durable yet "takes ink" well and doesn't bleed. To track the chronology of his work, he logs the flight numbers and destinations of his many business trips inside the cover of his sketchbooks. He sketches exclusively in ink (the better to "stick it down a fax machine"). He fleshes out the sketches on a computer before delegating detail work to members of his firm or outside contractors.
In concept meetings, the architect spends much of the time quietly sketching. Mr. Fisher describes this as an instinctual process. As he listens for the "pattern within the noise" of a discussion with many participants, he's also rifling through a mental library of references—architecture, zoology, photography—and matching visual cues to the materials available to make the design feasible, both financially and logistically.
Mr. Fisher grew up in a seaside town, where in winter he wandered among the deserted rides in a working-class resort. In 1965, he went to the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London, but conventional building design held little interest for him. Instead he experimented with inflatables, a specialty that later led him into collaboration with Pink Floyd, which incorporated his hulking balloon figures into its "Animals" tour.
A major influence on Mr. Fisher's aesthetic was the work of Archigram, an architecture collective formed on his campus whose mostly hypothetical designs explored nomadism and technology. Hints of the Walking City, a metropolis on robotic legs imagined by Ron Herron in 1964, can be glimpsed in the arching superstructure in U2's ongoing world tour, "U2 360°."
That idea began with a quest for a way that U2 could perform on a stage positioned in the center of a stadium, rather than at one end, as is done to accommodate all the gear. Willie Williams, U2's longtime show director, had an idea: the Theme building, a Los Angeles structure that resembles a spaceship on four curved legs, straddling a football field.
Drawing on his own work at a sewing machine, Mr. Fisher decided to drape the legs in tensile fabric, which becomes taut when crew members pop out a series of knobby "polyps" inside the frame. These nodes and the skin-like membrane gave the structure an insect-like look, hence its nickname: "the claw." Mr. Fisher says: "That gave the project its own language, making it a zoomorphic structure rather than a Jetsons pastiche."
On its surface, the remade "Wall" set doesn't look much different than it did in 1980. As on the original tour, the bricks are cardboard and a model plane appears to crash into the wall at the climax of "In the Flesh?" Now, however, ladder-like lifts bolster the set's $5 million worth machinery and 15 digital video projectors that can splash the entire 245-foot-wide wall with images of falling bombs or the original cartoons of Gerald Scarfe.
Mr. Fisher was on hand for the tour's launch to field Mr. Waters's final tweaks. Just before opening night, the team worried that when the singer struts about in a trenchcoat evoking the Third Reich, it might appear his character had actually turned fascist. Mr. Fisher's idea: Put a tailor's dummy on stage, allowing Mr. Waters to doff the coat and step out of the imaginary persona.
On Sept. 15, he watched the tour's debut in Toronto, where he could gauge the durability of a stage narrative laid out 30 years before. In Toronto, "there were moments where you could feel the house on the edge of tears," he says. "Considering it was a room of 17,000 semi-drunk Canadians, it was quite an achievement."
Creating: Mark Fisher, Concert Designer - WSJ.com
From the inflatable nuclear family floating over Pink Floyd audiences in 1977 to the arachnoid structure dominating U2's current megatour, Mark Fisher designs stage sets for music's elite, and his portfolio traces the evolution of the rock concert spectacle. He flanked the Rolling Stones's stage with tiered balconies, swooped Tina Turner over her audience with a 60-foot mechanical arm and sent a snorting locomotive into AC/DC's midst.
The architect has also increasingly branched out into other forms of what he calls "entertainment architecture," especially sports galas. A Brit, he was one of the only Westerners to work with Zhang Yimou on the ceremonies for Beijing's 2008 Olympics—his contributions included the glowing sphere, 60 feet in diameter, on which dancers seemed to defy gravity—and he's an executive producer of the ceremonies for the 2012 Olympics in London. He created a bulbous, helium-filled projection screen for the Commonwealth Games scheduled to start Oct. 3, and an island made to look like a ship for November's Asian Games in China.
[creating0924] François Dischinger for The Wall Street Journal
Mark Fisher
THE WIZARD OF ROCK
* Mark Fisher created the glowing sphere, 60 feet in diameter, on which dancers seemed to defy gravity for Beijing's 2008 Olympics.
* • He uses hardback sketchbooks that are custom bound in London and has used the same Souverän M800 model Pelikan fountain pen for about 20 years.
* • The stage now being used in U2's "360°" tour was inspired by the Theme building in Los Angeles, the futuristic designs of a '60s art collective and Mr. Fisher's own experiences working at a sewing machine.
* • Roger Waters's remake of Pink Floyd's "The Wall" uses 15 digital video projectors to splash a 245- foot-wide wall with images of falling bombs or the original cartoons of Gerald Scarfe.
Earlier this month, Mr. Fisher sat among a sea of empty seats in a darkened arena near Newark, N.J., watching former Pink Floyd singer Roger Waters lead his band through a rehearsal of "The Wall." Three decades ago, Mr. Fisher helped Pink Floyd bring its dark concept album to the stage by erecting a stark white wall in front of the band and splashing grotesque cartoons on it using 35mm film projectors. Now, the rebuilt Roger Waters show is on the road, updated with precision video projectors that can beam portraits of war victims onto each brick.
View Slideshow
[SB10001424052748703499604575512771598979384]
Revisiting this project reminded Mr. Fisher of how much the technology and budgets of stagecraft have changed, even as its purpose and his goals remain the same. "It has to do with the way a rock show is a sort of tribal event in our culture," he says. "It's preparing everyone for the arrival of the high priest."
The architect uses hardback sketchbooks that have been custom bound by Shepherds Bookbinders in London for his firm, Stufish, since his last supplier switched to inferior paper stock. The paper in his custom sketchbooks, ordered 50 at a time for about $20 each, is durable yet "takes ink" well and doesn't bleed. To track the chronology of his work, he logs the flight numbers and destinations of his many business trips inside the cover of his sketchbooks. He sketches exclusively in ink (the better to "stick it down a fax machine"). He fleshes out the sketches on a computer before delegating detail work to members of his firm or outside contractors.
In concept meetings, the architect spends much of the time quietly sketching. Mr. Fisher describes this as an instinctual process. As he listens for the "pattern within the noise" of a discussion with many participants, he's also rifling through a mental library of references—architecture, zoology, photography—and matching visual cues to the materials available to make the design feasible, both financially and logistically.
Mr. Fisher grew up in a seaside town, where in winter he wandered among the deserted rides in a working-class resort. In 1965, he went to the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London, but conventional building design held little interest for him. Instead he experimented with inflatables, a specialty that later led him into collaboration with Pink Floyd, which incorporated his hulking balloon figures into its "Animals" tour.
A major influence on Mr. Fisher's aesthetic was the work of Archigram, an architecture collective formed on his campus whose mostly hypothetical designs explored nomadism and technology. Hints of the Walking City, a metropolis on robotic legs imagined by Ron Herron in 1964, can be glimpsed in the arching superstructure in U2's ongoing world tour, "U2 360°."
That idea began with a quest for a way that U2 could perform on a stage positioned in the center of a stadium, rather than at one end, as is done to accommodate all the gear. Willie Williams, U2's longtime show director, had an idea: the Theme building, a Los Angeles structure that resembles a spaceship on four curved legs, straddling a football field.
Drawing on his own work at a sewing machine, Mr. Fisher decided to drape the legs in tensile fabric, which becomes taut when crew members pop out a series of knobby "polyps" inside the frame. These nodes and the skin-like membrane gave the structure an insect-like look, hence its nickname: "the claw." Mr. Fisher says: "That gave the project its own language, making it a zoomorphic structure rather than a Jetsons pastiche."
On its surface, the remade "Wall" set doesn't look much different than it did in 1980. As on the original tour, the bricks are cardboard and a model plane appears to crash into the wall at the climax of "In the Flesh?" Now, however, ladder-like lifts bolster the set's $5 million worth machinery and 15 digital video projectors that can splash the entire 245-foot-wide wall with images of falling bombs or the original cartoons of Gerald Scarfe.
Mr. Fisher was on hand for the tour's launch to field Mr. Waters's final tweaks. Just before opening night, the team worried that when the singer struts about in a trenchcoat evoking the Third Reich, it might appear his character had actually turned fascist. Mr. Fisher's idea: Put a tailor's dummy on stage, allowing Mr. Waters to doff the coat and step out of the imaginary persona.
On Sept. 15, he watched the tour's debut in Toronto, where he could gauge the durability of a stage narrative laid out 30 years before. In Toronto, "there were moments where you could feel the house on the edge of tears," he says. "Considering it was a room of 17,000 semi-drunk Canadians, it was quite an achievement."
