Eclectic Italian pop star Lorenzo “Jovanotti” Cherubini recently embarked on a nation-wide tour promoting “Ora”, his eighteenth album.
The show, produced by Lemon and Pepper, matches the artist’s combination of music genres for originality: from the very asymmetrical set design to the high-impact visuals using Christie Roadie HD+35K 3-chip DLP® projectors and an original automation set-up linking music, video and lights.
Lemon and Pepper founder and concert veteran Giorgio Ioan, on almost all the artist’s tours since 1992, was responsible for the overall production, “Jovanotti is very much his own director and was personally involved in all decisions taken. We decided to abandon the use of LED screens, which had become rather overworked and, for definition and visual impact, focussed on HD visuals, with two Christie Roadie HD+35K . I’d used Christie’s 20k units in the past, so, when I heard 35,000 lumens models were available, I asked to see them and was knocked out by their brightness, resolution and colour.”
Described by Jovanotti as a “live sci-fi film”, the show, based on a project conceived by Giancarlo Sforza, opens with a video of Piero Angela, Italy’s best-known science TV program host, inviting spectators aboard a spaceship to go on a fantastic journey, explaining that some of the objects they would see had never been closely observed, so had been re-created with avant-garde technology. Jovanotti’s rotating 3D image is then designed on the screen and the artist himself appears in a cloud of smoke to the pumping up-tempo “Megamix”, opening a show that includes songs like the emblematic “The Biggest show after the Big Bang”.
On the opposite side of the set from the huge lighting “matrix” forming a backdrop for Jovanotti’s six-piece band, a 13.30 x 6.80 metre projection screen, which changes format during the show, thanks to two horizontal and two vertical custom roller-mounted “wings”, whose motor controllers are interfaced with the lighting and projection system.
The projectors were supplied by video contractor STS Communication from Bresso (Milan), the first to purchase the units in Italy, as general manager Alessandro Rosani explains: “We bought the first three Christie Roadie HD+35K projectors in the spring of 2010 and a fourth at the beginning of 2011. Before the Jovanotti tour, we used them on a tour by another top Italian pop star, Elisa, and a wide variety of other high profile applications: fashion parades, architectural projections (including the spectacular “Coliseum on Fire” on Rome’s most famous monument in 2010), 2011 New Year celebrations in Naples and a large convention with 3D projections. The features that convinced us were without doubt their reliability and power – although the units are almost always doubled up during the show, for some songs, one projector itself is sufficient!”
The seven-man STS team (four cameramen and three control ops) led by video director Emigliano Napoli feeds video content to the two Christie 2048x1080 DLP projectors, flown approximately 18 metres from the screen on the lighting truss running out above the show’s thrust stage. STS used a full-HD video production system, with three Sony HD cameras (stage-front, FOH and shoulder-mounted). A Polecam with a Toshiba 1/3” 3-CCD HD camera and a Canon EOS 5D camera in video format, were used for a “warmer” cinema-style effect on one number.
Apart from two songs, all live coverage is processed with high-impact effects by I Ragazzi della Prateria (Carlo Zoratti and Marco Mucig), who developed almost all the software exclusively for the show with Portuguese programmer Guilherme Lopes. Zoratti explains: “We worked with Lorenzo on the visual concept - graphics, images and animation - coordinated by artistic director Sergio Papalettera and, as well as live shots, content includes works by several video artists and footage from state broadcaster RAI’s archives.”
Keyboard player Cristian Rigano triggers the effects on the songs’ videos and the graphic contents, on two STS Pandoras Box media servers, are also sync’d via SMPTE with the keyboards. Eye-catching effects include those projected on the artist’s “green screen” jacket.
Zoratti adds, “The decision to use the Christie projectors for this show was the right one. We found them very interesting and, in particular, get excellent results with ‘documentary’ videos such as images seen through a microscope and dolphins swimming in the water. They enable the audience to appreciate all the details, colour nuances and chromatic dynamics, which would have been brutally ‘flattened’ by a LED screen.”
Pappalettera concludes, “After having entrusted the visuals for previous tours to LED screens and other technology, we decided to face the problem of the visuals’ definition, as the tour’s concept essentially concentrates on the use of abstract, never static, images. We achieved extraordinary results with the definition and sharpness of these two projectors, particularly for video artist Francesco Fonda’s video for the song “L'Elemento Umano”, with imperceptible sophisticated focus changes and ‘macro’ closeups, which the projectors enable to be appreciated to the utmost. They also perform excellently for live coverage, with excellent interaction between live images and the real-time video processing projected on Lorenzo’s movements on stage. In “Io Danzo”, another program interacted with the live coverage of the artist and band, creating multiple pencil-thin lines outlining them as they moved – here too the sharp clean projections resulted in extraordinary effects!”
The lighting, designed by Canadian LD AJ Pen (Linkin Park, Simple Minds, Avril Lavigne, Marilyn Manson, Yes, etc.), uses a custom control set-up driven by Ableton Live, with proprietary software written by programmer Seth Robinson translating MIDI notes and control changes into MIDI Show Control.
To quote “L’Elemento Umano”, Jovanotti and his band are the apparently tireless “Human Element in the Machine”, a futuristic machine which, thanks to its combination of knockout HD visuals, groundbreaking set design, audio, video and lighting effects, is ensuring ecstatic SRO crowds nationwide a night to remember.