Portishead's two headlining slots at the I'll Be Your Mirror festival staged by All Tomorrows' Parties at Alexandra Palace, London, saw the band backdropped by a stage-wide LED video curtain that featured the work of video director John Minton and video content designers As Described, who filled it with an hallucinatory smorgasbord of grungy imagery and deliberately lo-fi, distorted i-mag work that perfectly fitted the band's intense, often darkly edgy set.
The screen itself, the latest 20mm pixel-pitch LED curtain from Stage Electrics, made its début on the tour. The company, brought in by As Described, provided 100m² of panels for a screen size of 14 x 7 metres, flown from four 1 ton Lodestars and 14 metres of Prolyte Truss, along with mains distro and a portable production unit consisting of two Analog Way Tetra-VIO scalers, preview monitors and a 32x32 Composite Matrix Switcher.
That rig had served for the band's summer festival dates including Benicassim, Exit, Hurricane, Paleo, Roskilde and Werchter, while for the final two IBYM shows at Alexandra Palace the production was expanded to include a pair of Sanyo XF47 15K projectors atop two truss towers, back projecting onto a pair of 16' x 9' fast fold screens. Stage Electrics' input was completed by black drapes.
All of this high technology was fed by a camera and production system of an altogether different hue. I-mag, of the standard headshot variety, was nowhere to be seen. Instead there was a mix of pre-created content, blended with heavily treated images from 10 CCTV cameras dotted around the stage and two more backstage in what the team describe as their 'dirt box' to create video feedback loops and other effects.
The fixed onstage camera heads deliver live footage which includes a profile view of singer Beth Gibbons from stage left and a close-up of her from a downstage left position. A shot across guitarist Adrian Utley's pedals cuts to another of him with the big screen in the background, creating a feedback loop. Shots shimmer across the snare and hi-hat. Three more are located around the toms, decks and bass drum. In a democratic touch, another little camera pokes its beady eye behind the screen through the band at the audience. A handheld pit camera, which takes in Gibbons or Utley on different cues, completes the lineup.
How did the look of the show come about? Video director John Minton takes up the story. "It has evolved through years of working with Portishead - a long collaboration. It's a very analogue look, very glitchy; anything that isn't clean is Portishead, basically: degrading the image, a VHS look. A lot of the visuals do actually bounce down to VHS; we put them through circuit bending, glitch boxes and so on; it's all very hands-on and live. The cameras we use are CCTV standard definition monochrome cameras. We had a tour two or three years ago; that's how we set up then, and this is a continuation of that."
He adds: "When we played festivals with side screens during the summer we tried putting i-mag from the festival production on those screens, but we got a bit bored with that, so we took it over and just put our content out to the sides. We don't do content for every tune, though - there's a couple of tunes where we either start in black and then come in halfway through with video, and there's one whole tune, Sour Times, which is all black. For that, we turn our big screen black and then I continue to mix a simple i-mag thing to the sides. Then we punch it back in on the cue and it all explodes!
"In fact, it was [Portishead manager] Debbie Rawlings, who made the suggestion - because we're always on stage right we don't get the full effect of what's going on - she was out front at one of the festivals and she said, "You should just put your images out there," so we did. A simple solution: take them out of the equation and then we didn't have to deal with any cameramen on stage or anything like that, so it killed many birds with one stone."
Screen content is fed from the cameras via a matrix into a pair of vision mixers along with As Described's media, running in Resolume on a MacBook Pro using a Midi controller. Parts of the edit are routed to a pair of black and white CRT monitors, which are refilmed and put back into the loop to create video feedback.
As Described director Adam Seaman - whose business partner, Jim Horsfield, handled the Resolume programming - comments: "We're doing an analogue process of the effects and then controlling those effects - so effectively half the rig is the mix side of it, while the other side is what we affectionately call a 'dirt box', our workbench which has a feedback monitor with a custom controller for the vertical and horizontal holds and brightness. Another monitor which we've modified as an oscilloscope has a camera pointing at it, and another camera points at a VU meter which is linked into a stage box, taking a sound feed off the desk. So it's not computer processed - it's very real effects, all quite lo-fi and very textural.
"We're using quite modern kit but it's creating a very old, standard definition look to go to this big, 14 by 7 metre screen, and that's the look of the show. It's not about it being clean and crisp, it's about having feeling and emotional quality."
FIRST, CHOOSE YOUR SCREEN
"We were looking for a very good screen to do the job," continues Seaman, "and because we were doing the festival circuit it needed to go up fast, be light and flexible and generally practical to use. We went to Stage Electrics and they came up with a really good solution for a good price for us and we've been really happy with it.
"On certain festival dates, because of the nature of the other bands on we've had to use other screens, and we've always really wanted to get back to using our own screen because of the continuity of the panel colour, the curves of the contrast and the tonal quality of it, and it's been reliable as well. We've only had one backing crew smash ladders through it but we suitably reprimanded them. In fact if something like that happens you can just go up on a ladder and pull out a tile, swap it over, replace the data and power cables and you're away."
Stage Electrics' project manager Mark Connolly adds: "It's got a wide viewing angle of 170 degrees and the refresh rate is 800Hz, which is great for television. One billion colours, an eighth-generation control system and weighs 10 kilos per square metre - quite a good formula." It all packs in Stage Electrics-designed 'meat racks' in pre-assembled two by three panel sections.
He says set up time is "somewhat dependent on the local crews", but qualifies: "if we come up on stage and we've got what we've asked for with the power and the points for the truss, it can go up - and be got out - in 20 minutes. We have four meat racks on stage, including one spare, and then build it in two groups of two using local crews.
As to interaction with lighting, he says: "Lighting work in a very similar way to us. Tony Austin, the LD, has worked with the band from the off. He's an experienced guy, and we've worked together now on the last two tours. So we just discuss things and just work with it, go with the flow, and we learn each other's shows as we go.
The screen, he says, is "running at about 20% of full brightness - we keep it really low so that it's similar to projection levels. On the other hand, there were some gigs, like at Paleo, when Tony was blitzing the stage with light I was just thinking, 'right I'm just going to punch through a bit more', and turned it up. It's good to be able to do that when you need to."