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When I was first introduced to the Freeland project there was a lot of focus around creating a seamless show between the visual and audio elements. The key members of the band were fully behind creating an immersive environment. This meant we would be able to build the show around the audio and video.
It was decided that a good starting point would be to film the key vocalists in a blue screen environment.
This would serve 2 purposes:
(1) As there were many different vocalists for this project if one of them could not make a gig then we would use their video version instead.
(2) The vocalist could jam alongside a 3D version of themselves.
As we were at this time not restricting ourselves to the realities of
budget, we had soon come up with ideas for video backing singers to accompany
our lead vocalists. We were going to project the main video avatar onto
a 15 ft egg shaped sphere (which would self-inflate). Behind this 4 further
smaller "eggs" would drop down. On these we would just project the lips
of our backing singers. When the audio track was recorded the lead vocal
and backing vocals were sung by the same person, what we were trying to
do was translate this into a live performance. So that the lead vocalist
could accompany themselves. Not only would they be able to accompany themselves
but we would be able to change the visual context of backing singers.
So in this case our backing singers would just be a pair of lips, a bit
like a cross between something from the little shop of horrors and sesame
street.
After the realities of budgets and the physical sizes of most clubs was considered, we had a 8 ft self-inflating head built. This was to be the interface between the band and the crowd.
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