case study 2018 3 min read

The Killers’ World Tour

disguise joins The Killers’ ‘Wonderful Wonderful World Tour’.

American rock band The Killers continue their ‘Wonderful Wonderful World Tour,’ on which the disguise 2x4pro (one active, one understudy) maps a dynamic set designed by Fireplay’s Josh Zangen and facilitate Notch realtime generative effects. This is the fifth major tour by The Killers, and its 115 dates in Europe, the Americas and Oceania support their ‘Wonderful Wonderful’ studio album. The tour began last November and will conclude this summer.

The video-intensive set features two giant pyramidal display surfaces upstage as well as screens that wrap around three sides of the stage.

The band was considering ideas for a new look, and large-scale video was something we hadn’t done on previous tours so it seemed an obvious way to go. It also gave us lots of scope to change the stage on a song-to-song basis by altering the number of video surfaces we used.”

Lighting/Laser Designer and Creative Design Consultant, Steven Douglas

"A number of the disguise features were seen as advantageous to the show", says disguise Programmer Dan Gentile. “Its mapping features have definitely been a huge advantage, as are its ability to change surfaces, as we bounce between our own show with a complete rig and festival setting shows, and coming ready to run Notch blocks.”

The versatility of the disguise system made it the obvious choice. We knew we wanted to do more with Notch effects so the seamless integration of the two systems was a big plus. Our Production Manager, Michael Oberg, had brought video vendor Big Picture on board for this tour, and they were also very keen to use disguise.”

Lighting/Laser Designer and Creative Design Consultant, Steven Douglas

disguise Programmer, Dale Rehbein echoes the “Swiss Army Knife” capabilities of the system and also cites “the ability to utilise multiple devices to trigger content playback and the flexibility to handle the large forced perspective canvas as one or as discrete outputs.”

During the prepro process, “once we had the design it took a couple of days to build out the surfaces and the routing, but once we had the layout done everything else was able to slot right in,” says Dan. “That’s incredibly helpful when there are constant changes to the content running up to the first set of shows.”

Dale adds; “The system also allowed me to provide content creators Blink with the correct pixel templates. The biggest stumbling block for this project was how to create the upstage centre pyramid. Aside from the engineering of custom 45-degree/diamond frames by ACASS Engineering, the challenge was maximising the output raster, plus gaining 45-degree rotation from the 2x4pro to an LED processor without any rotate function. By treating the LED screen as a projection surface and rolling the projector output I was able to satisfy my overall concerns early on. Once the feed map was cut up for the 1920x1080 feed to handle the pyramid within the constraints of the LED processor, I was a lot happier about pushing on.”

Dan found the Sock Puppet feature to be “incredibly useful on this tour as control of disguise is split between me and Steven, who is able to toggle different parameters on and off. Setting different attributes to a DMX channel that it wouldn’t normally default to was key to getting everything integrated with lighting.

The media server has pretty much been a non-issue the entire tour: Every idea or question has been met with a quick solution within the software, and considering how powerful disguise can be it certainly is intuitive in its layout making changes with ease.”