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Zooropa1310

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Notice on the Chicago DVD, there were "peremeter" lights (they went across the upper section around the stadium). Ones that lit up with the ellipse. Now, these werent at every show. I didnt notice them in my first leg or third leg show. So what was the deciding factor to use those lights or not? :scratch:
 
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They were only used for filming the DVD in Chicago. They were not included at any other show because not every arena has the equipment to use them.
 
I anticipate this effect being used for every possible arena show in the future.

It was also used at the MTV MVAs back in late august.

u2fp
 
Seems quite possible that it could be used regularly, considering most major arenas now incorporate a thin ring of lights around the upper decks that is capable of showing video.

When they came out to play Zoo Station at Philly II (May 22nd), all the advertising board lights came on and flickered on and off. It seemed to be some whacky arena glitch, but it seemed to fit perfectly with the ZooTV thing, haha.
 
not every arena has the lights that completely ring the arena like that... and i would imagine even for the ones that do, that not every one of the arenas has the technology available to allow the lighting techs to patch in to it, and/or they were just playing around with it and it looked good but was hard to do so they just did it for the dvd. :shrug:
 
Zooropa1310 said:
Notice on the Chicago DVD, there were "peremeter" lights (they went across the upper section around the stadium). Ones that lit up with the ellipse. Now, these werent at every show. I didnt notice them in my first leg or third leg show. So what was the deciding factor to use those lights or not? :scratch:

This is an excerpt from Willie's Diary (on U2.com) where he talks about these lights in his // 08.05.2005 Chicago. Video shoot load in. entry:
By a happy coincidence, the United Center (a basketball arena) happens to have a continuous band of LED screens that circle the court. In fact there are two bands, one on the front face of each balcony, which form narrow rings of video surface used as advertising space. I’d seen this in another arena (Denver?) and thought how extraordinary this would look if we could plug it into our system and use it to run our video sequences. It was too much to hope that Chicago would have something similar, but it does, so we set about colonizing it in the name of art. This proved to be far more easily said than done, as the control system for the screens is ancient, without even a USB port to plug into. In fact the entire thing seems to be run from a gas cooker in the basement kitchens, but Smasher is not a man easily discouraged. Much rested on the shoulders of Jeff, the house guy in charge of said LED surfaces. The process of getting image up there was pain itself. Smasher had to remake all the elements from scratch in a format that the gas cooker could understand, hand them over to Jeff on appropriate bakeware then poor Jeff had to sit for hours loading it in, one morsel at a time till the timer went ping. It was not looking promising.

And from his next entry:
Down in the basement, Jeff and his gas cooker were sending video playback to the LED screens encircling the arena. Smasher had made very simple pieces – mostly thin bands of colour to mimic the LED rings in the Vertigo stage and expand the look to fill the building. It was a huge look and on camera it looked like we’d dropped a million dollars on the idea. Control was a bit of an issue, but all remained calm and as long as we kept it simple, all seemed OK.

And the next day...:
Man of the match, though, was Jeff, operator of the in-house LED advertising signs. After a couple of days of pain, he really took the ball and ran with it. We had made some video sequences to complement the LED circles of the Vertigo stage and despite the ancient in-house control gear he hit all his cues and made it happen. During Vertigo itself (which the band played twice for reasons yet to become apparent), the red vortex lines jetted round the whole building. It was pretty awesome for an effect which cost nothing but the sweat of a Belgian to produce.

Want to know more? :wink:
 
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