Svana Gisla, and Baillie Walsh talk about ABBA Voyage Show
Televisionation - Jun 28th, 2022
miércoles, 29 de junio de 2022
martes, 28 de junio de 2022
Benny... Dave Grohl
From ABBA The New Songs
ref: abba the new songs
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Kylie Minouge and Dave Grohl, pay tribute to ABBA https://www.facebook.com/abbaregistro/videos/415046859652012
sábado, 25 de junio de 2022
Baillie Walsh Director ABBA Voyage interview.
Baillie Walsh Director ABBA Voyage interview.
Thanks James King.
ref: abba the new songs 1 atns1
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viernes, 24 de junio de 2022
ABBA VOYAGE AFTER PARTY PHOTOGRAPHS!!!
Thank you Mr. Andy Wetson for sharing with ABBA fans
https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?vanity=DJAndyAlmighty&set=a.10158329430251193
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ref: Abba The New songs on facebook - ATNS1
jueves, 23 de junio de 2022
ABBA Voyage – the director on how he brought the Swedish supergroup back to its 1970s pomp
ABBA Voyage – the director on how he brought the Swedish supergroup back to its 1970s pomp
Katie RosseinskyThu, June 23, 2022
ABBA Voyage – the director on how he brought the Swedish supergroup back to its 1970s pomp
Katie Rosseinsky
From Oasis to Kylie Minogue, Massive Attack to New Order, director Baillie Walsh has spent his career working with some of the biggest names in music. His latest project is a little different, not least because his musical collaborators are composed of millions of pixels, recreating the four stars of ABBA in their pomp. “They don’t complain – they’re not saying, ‘Oh, we can only do one performance tonight,’” Walsh laughs of the digital performers.
As director of ABBA Voyage, his task was to dream up a virtual concert experience that recreates the magic of watching the Swedish pop group in their 1970s imperial phase. At its heart are the four all-singing, all-dancing ABBAtars – painstakingly recreated digital renderings of Benny Andersson, Björn Ulvaeus, Agnetha FÓ“ltskog and Anni-Frid Lyngstad, created by the special effects whizzes at Industrial Light and Magic.
When they appear on screen at the purpose-built arena in Stratford’s Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park to the opening strains of The Visitors, twirling their embellished capes, the effect is staggering – and strangely euphoric. “The challenging part was restraint,” Walsh says. “I wanted the tech to be the secondary part. I love a light show, but I didn’t want it to be this tech wonderland because I think you lose emotion that way.”
A big question for the director and his team was: “Is it possible we can have emotions for these avatars?” Judging by the sheer volume of tears – from surreptitious eye-wiping to unabashed waterworks – in the arena each night, it seems the answer is yes. As Minogue, who was at the show’s opening night, puts it, “This technical feat manages to emote… it offers an embrace and welcomes us to this otherworldly but ultimately human experience.”
A lifelong ABBA fan, Walsh says the group’s music is “in my DNA” and living in the West End, it’s ubiquitous – “Every day outside my window, the tuk-tuks are playing Dancing Queen.” He was approached by show producers Svana Gisla and Ludvig Andersson – Benny’s son – three years ago, having worked with the former on music videos for Massive Attack, as well as on Oasis documentary Lord Don’t Slow Me Down and the film Springsteen and I. Then came a Zoom call with Andersson and Ulvaeus. “I was in Iceland on holiday, they were in their cabins in Sweden – the whole thing was very surreal.”
The band spent five weeks filming in Stockholm’s Filmhuset to capture their movements and expressions; then came another filming session using performance doubles to amp up the routines, overseen by choreographer Wayne McGregor. A few songs were added and dropped along the way, but the set list was “very much theirs – I can’t tell ABBA what songs they should play!” Walsh says. “It was obviously strange because Benny and Bjorn had shaved their beards because we needed them to do so for motion capture.
“They’re in weird motion capture suits, [wearing] shoes with bubbles on them, but they got over it very quickly and were very un-self-conscious – then you’re just watching ABBA, and those mo-cap suits become invisible… When the four of them came together and they performed that first song, it [was] breathtaking.”
Hi-tech motion capture suits are hardly the strangest outfits that ABBA have worn. In their heyday, they were famed for outlandish stage gear – “they came from that period where anything went,” says Walsh – which could be classified as theatrical costumes, tax deductible under Swedish law. The 2022 ABBAtars wear retro-modern ensembles by costume designer B Ȧkerlund, who worked with the likes of Dolce and Gabbana and Manish Arora. “[They] made the clothes physically and we filmed them to see how they moved,” Walsh says. “Then ILM built them digitally – they had to weave every thread.”
Getting the ABBAtars’ faces right was even more arduous. “You start with the skeleton, and then you put skin on them; it’s such a gradual process,” the director explains. “You think, ‘We’ve got it’, but once it’s in motion, it’s gone.” It was, he adds, “scary at times, because it just didn’t look like them… You’d find Benny[’s likeness] for a song, then the next one, he’d be gone again.” The light show – which comprises 500 moving lights, mapped to 30,000 points in the arena – had to line up with the ABBAtars too, as “every lighting change you make changes the faces”. No wonder the project required a mind-boggling 1 billion hours of computer time in total.
There are plenty of clever touches throughout that help suspend the audience’s disbelief. The virtual stage on screen perfectly lines up with the physical stadium and the lighting rig, giving a seamlessly three dimensional feel; the band fade and recede as they move ‘backstage’. “That screen can never just be a screen,” Walsh says. “When you go and see a live band, you see people moving around in the dark - it just felt like that was going to add an awful lot to the believability.”
It’s not all high realism – some of Voyage’s most thrilling moments wink at the artificial set up, including a breathtaking sequence when an overhead shot featuring oversized ABBAtars flips over to reveal the ‘band’ standing back in formation, human-sized again. “It’s almost like you’re playing a game of what’s real and what’s not,” Walsh says. “We’re not denying that they’re digital avatars, we’re embracing that. And I think the audience appreciates that.”
The intricacy of the tech meant that every light cue and remark from the ABBAtars had to be sketched out years before, but if the show ever rolls out to other venues – the stadium was designed to “in a way be flat pack, so you can take it down and move it” – Walsh would love to record extra tracks to slot into the set, with The Day Before You Came top of the wish list.
The technology, he believes, will “get better and better, and much cheaper”, so other groups are likely to follow in ABBA’s (digital) footsteps. Andersson and Ulvaeus suggested in an interview last month that the virtual concert treatment could pull off the seemingly impossible and reunite Walsh’s former collaborators, Oasis. “I don’t think Oasis would be up for it,” he counters. “They love to tour – I mean, they don’t together, but Liam and Noel do. And Noel made a comment ages ago, you know, he loves to be a bit negative” (he described the concept as “meaningless” in an interview with The Sun).
The fact that all four members of ABBA were able to take part in Voyage removes the ethical murkiness of previous virtual performance, he says. “We were able to reinvent them visually – if this had been a posthumous show, you can’t do that, but because they were involved in the whole thing, we were able to bring them into 2022… When you do Whitney Houston [as a hologram] and Whitney’s not around, it doesn’t feel right.” All the speeches and remarks delivered by the ABBAtars “were written by ABBA. It’s them, they’re present… How are you going to do that with John Lennon and George Harrison? Are you going to hoke it together?”
When Voyage was in its early stages, Walsh the show with work on Being James Bond, a documentary exploring Daniel Craig’s stint as the world’s most famous spy through previously unseen footage and candid conversations between Craig and Bond producers Barbara Broccoli and Michael G Wilson.
Walsh has been great friends with Craig since before his days as 007. Craig also starred in his 2008 film Flashbacks of a Fool between Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace and praised Walsh’s “astonishing creativity and […] laser-like eye for detail, two things that often don’t sit well together”.
“I’d spent a lot of time on the Bond sets, so I’d been around for all of it,” Walsh says. “I’d seen Dan become Bond. But when I went back to find visuals, looking at all the B-roll, I was really taken aback by what Dan had gone through. I just wanted to make a portrait of the man I know and was incredibly proud of.”
Looking back, the furore around Craig’s casting – which dwelt on his hair colour and questioned whether wearing a life jacket for a photo op on the Thames had destroyed his action hero credentials – seems bizarre. “It was insane,” Walsh says. “It was really, really tough for him… the UK press loves to build you up and slap you down, or slap you down then build you up… All those papers were just vicious with him.”
Casino Royale put paid to those criticisms, and Craig went on to become the longest serving Bond of all time. “15 years is a long time to be in an iconic role, and I think it’s very difficult to give up,” Walsh says. “If you become one of the biggest stars in the world playing this role, walking away from that is quite a hard thing to do.” Pierce Brosnan, of course, famously followed up his turn as Bond with a role in Mamma Mia! “There we go,” Walsh says, “why don’t we bring Dan into ABBA? Those two worlds collide again…”
martes, 21 de junio de 2022
ROE VISUAL TRAVELS ALONG ON THE ABBA VOYAGE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MNzdCz7lTkE
ROE VISUAL TRAVELS ALONG ON THE ABBA VOYAGE
Solotech Selects ROE Visual as Display Supplier
Leek, The Netherlands (June 21, 2022) – Taking many months of meticulous preparations, the highly anticipated ABBA Voyage concert premiered at the ABBA Arena on May 26 in London. The specially created digital versions of the famous ABBA personages come to life on a vast ROE Visual LED wall supplied by Solotech.
This eagerly anticipated live music event of the decade, ABBA Voyage, is performed in the purpose-built ABBA Arena, designed by Stufish Entertainment Architects in London, bringing the 70s supergroup back to the stage in a seamless blend of the virtual and physical worlds.
The digital versions of ABBA were created following weeks and months of motion-capture and performance techniques with the four band members, director Baillie Walsh and legendary VFX company Industrial Light & Magic, the company's first foray into music.
The ABBA avatars are realized through a vast 65-million-pixel ROE Visual LED screen, rendered life-size on stage and in photo-realistic close-ups, resulting in a breath-taking experience with the look and feel of a full-fledged live show.
As the complete audio visual package supplier, including 20 lighting rigs, more than 500 moving lights, 291 speakers, and all the LED displays, Solotech delivered the technology and, foremost, its in-depth expertise to the show.
Solotech worked under the direction of director Baillie Walsh, working alongside Aniara's Technical Producer Nick Levitt and Technical Director Joe Frisina, and collaborating with concert producers Svana Gisla and Ludvig Andersson, Industrial Light and Magic (ILM,) and TETRO and Greenwall's Fredrik Stormby to provide audio, lighting, and video solutions capable of pushing the boundaries for live productions. Scott Willsallen from Auditoria supervised the audio elements of the show, with VYV Photon servers specified and programmed by Anthony "Bez" Bezencon.
Working in close collaboration with ABBA's production team, Ian "Woody" Woodall, Solotech UK's Director of Special Projects, led the project, with Paul "Macca" McCauley overseeing the installation of the rental equipment in the venue, and serving as the host to technical demos of the system in the many months leading up to the show. Solotech's Robin Conway oversaw audio, Oli James handled lighting, and Alex Mulrenan managed video and cameras.
State-of-the-art equipment was chosen from leading manufacturers, including ROE Visual, VYV, Robe, L-Acoustics and others, to augment the filmed performance footage with the technology used throughout the venue. The show features one of the largest installations of ROE Visual Black Pearl BP2V2 LED screens, driven by Brompton 4K Tessera SX40 LED processors. It is one of the tallest installations of Black Pearl screens, standing 19 panels high. Next to the Black Pearl LED wall, the ABBA Voyage is decorated with over 4200 ROE LED strips.
The Black Pearl LED panels were selected based on their immaculate track record in virtual production technology. With the panels' performance being so stable, the technical team could focus on bringing all technologies together without unnecessary distraction.
"When you embark on something as ground-breaking as this, most people think it's a crazy idea until it becomes a reality and then suddenly it's the best thing ever! ROE Visual has been very supportive throughout the whole process, supporting our 'crazy ideas'! We have pushed the product beyond its standard capabilities, and thanks to the reliability of Black Pearl BP2V2, it allowed us to bring so many different technologies together to achieve our goal", comments Woody.
Besides the Black Pearl, ROE Visual also supplied over 4200 pieces of ROE Strip in various lengths. The ROE Strip was used creatively to join the virtual and physical worlds together. They not only feature in the internal tunnels that transport the audience from the 'real outside world' to the inside of the ABBA Arena but feature prominently in the show across the stage, walls and even roof, where the vertical timber battens incorporate the iconic ABBA logo made of the ROE Strip LED lights.
The ROE Strip is an elegant linear LED element suited for all sorts of creative applications. The multiple cover options and variable lengths make it an ideal LED element to accentuate set designs, structures or interior features. The LEDs are freely mappable so that any video content can be played on them.
Woody says: "This project has been special as we've spent two years of our lives working on it. It is the most technically complicated and challenging project I have ever been involved in, underlined by the fact that everyone who has been there cannot find the words to describe it. The show's technical elements have been virtually flawless from the rehearsals through to opening night on a show that is breaking new ground. These are accomplishments that we are extremely proud of."
https://www.roevisual.com/en/news-and-events/news/central-role-for-roe-visual-led-at-the-abba-voyage
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BON VOYAGE: ‘SPECIAL’ ABBA SHOW OFF TO A FLYER
AV specialist Solotech details its work on the groundbreaking production, which is set to run in London until May 2023
By James Hanley on 07 Jun 2022
Johan Persson/ABBA Voyage
AV tech specialist Solotech UK has opened up on the groundbreaking ABBA Voyage live music event, which launched last month in London.
The project, which blends the virtual and physical worlds, brings the Swedish group back to the stage (in avatar form) for the first time in 40 years, backed by a 10-piece live band.
Agnetha, Björn, Benny and Anni-Frid spent five weeks being filmed by 160 cameras for motion capture as they performed the songs that make up the show’s 95-minute runtime. The show debuted to rave reviews at the demountable 3,000-cap ‘ABBA Arena’ – a purpose-built venue devised by entertainment architect Stufish – at Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park on 26 May.
ABBA’s Benny Andersson recently told Variety that more than 380,000 tickets have already been sold for the production, which is currently set to run until late May 2023. Tickets are priced from £21 to £175, with a variety of different ticket types available for the concerts, including general admission (standing), auditorium seating and dance booths – of which there are eight, each named after people from the ABBA universe.
Global audiovisual and entertainment technology leader Solotech has worked on concerts by the likes of Taylor Swift, Bruno Mars, Paul McCartney and Lady Gaga, and brought its expertise to the Voyage project, led by director of special projects Ian “Woody” Woodall in collaboration with ABBA’s production team.
“IT IS THE MOST TECHNICALLY COMPLICATED AND CHALLENGING PROJECT I HAVE EVER BEEN INVOLVED IN”
“This project has been special as we’ve spent two years of our lives working on it,” says Woodall. “It is the most technically complicated and challenging project I have ever been involved in. This is proven by the fact that everyone who has been there cannot find the words to describe it.
“The technical elements of the show have been virtually flawless from the rehearsals through to opening night on a show that is breaking new ground. These are accomplishments that we are extremely proud of.”
The company’s Paul “Macca” McCauley oversaw the installation of the rental equipment in the venue, and served as the host to technical demos of the system in the months leading up to the show, while the firm’s Robin Conway oversaw audio, Oli James handled lighting and Alex Mulrenan managed video and cameras.
“THE WORLD HAS NEVER SEEN A CONCERT ON A SCALE LIKE THIS BEFORE”
Ticketmaster UK was named the official ticketing partner for the Voyage concerts last year, tasked with providing the technology required to run all shows as 100% digital.
“The world has never seen a concert on a scale like this before and we’re beyond proud to be involved,” said Ticketmaster UK MD Andrew Parsons. “We’ve had the privilege of working alongside the ABBA team since the concert’s conception, and together we’re going to give ABBA fans the greatest experience from the moment they buy a ticket right through to show time.”
Get more stories like this in your inbox by signing up for IQ Index, IQ’s free email digest of essential live music industry news.
https://www.iq-mag.net/2022/06/bon-voyage-special-abba-show-off-to-a-flyer/
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ABBA´s Voyage costumes
From Abba The New songs on Facebook
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Everything You Need to Know About ABBA’s Voyage Costumes
Laird Borrelli-Persson — Tiempo de lectura: 3 minutos
Everything You Need to Know About ABBA’s Voyage Costumes
Image may contain Clothing Apparel AnniFrid Lyngstad Human Person Evening Dress Fashion Gown Robe and Dress
The ABBAtars in Dolce & Gabbana.Photo: Dolce & Gabbana / Courtesy of ABBA Voyage
Among the things Sweden is known for are tech innovation and ABBA. For the past two years, while fashion has been buzzing about NFTs, the members of the band (median age 75), have been working on a revolutionary concept concert for their latest album, Voyage, with George Lucas’s company, Light & Magic (ILM).
This Voyage concert, which will be performed in residency a custom-built arena in London, is big, big news not only because ABBA, one of the best-selling acts of all time, had been dormant for 40 years until returning in 2021 with an album, also called Voyage, but because this newfangled concert will attempt to bridge the digital and physical worlds with light, sound, and “ABBAtars”—not holograms—using performance capture that’s combined with archival footage. The audience will hear songs recorded by the quartet and performed by avatars projected on an invisible screen and accompanied by a live band.
In many ways Voyage puts futuristic technology in service to nostalgia. The Benny Andersson, Björn Ulvaeus, Agnetha Fältskog, and Anni-Frid Lyngstad who perform will be “de-aged” to look like their 1979 selves rather than their present ones. But this fetishization of youth only extends to beauty. The band will not be wearing the flared-leg jeans, clogs, or cat dresses they favored in the Me Decade. Bea Åkerlund, a fellow Swede, well-known for working with musicians, was engaged as the costume designer.
Åkerlund has been working on the project since 2019, which is when she first got a call from the Emmy Award winning director Johan Renck. “I’ve done some other big Swedish iconic brands and I thought, of course ABBA would be the ultimate Swedish icon pop stars to work for,” she said on a Zoom call. The first step was to research the band’s fashions over the years, but her aim was to interpret its aura rather than recreate past looks. “We wanted to make it modern, yet have the feel of the ABBA aesthetic, which is quite hard. So the thought process was that if ABBA never aged and if they were to go on tour now, what would they look like?”
For starters, no cat dresses are involved. Åkerlund retained the idea of an animal, but chose the phoenix as being representative of the band’s reemergence. “I chose Manish [Arora] because he does intensive beading, and I really wanted the opening costumes to be really elaborate…[and] super-embellished. There are thousands and thousands of Swarovski crystals mixed in with embroidery to accomplish that.”
Erevos Aether, Greek designers working out of London, are responsible for the band’s light-up “ABBAtron” costumes. “I thought that they understood the concept of the future, and they work a lot in plexi and neoprene, [which] are really good materials because you can dance [in them]. They allowed for another extra element besides just lighting up the costume.” Michael Schmidt, who once made a dress for Debbie Harry out of razor blades, and who has a way with metal mesh, was Åkerlund’s pick, using the material to make costumes “that felt disco, yet modern.” For the finale, Åkerlund says she wanted to make the band members “bigger than life, sort of like Greek gods.” Recalling that Dolce & Gabbana had worked on that theme before, she turned to them for elaborately embellished pieces. “They have the craftsmanship and they have the knowledge of what it is that I’m after.”
There are about 20 costume changes in Voyage, yet not one garment was fitted on Benny, Agnetha, Anna-Frid, or Björn. Åkerlund worked with body doubles. Sketches were approved by ABBA, and then the actual garments were scanned. ABBA performed the concert in green suits, and so it is their movement, and voices, the audience will enjoy. Because she wanted everything “to look as real as possible,” each finished garment was digitized to capture every physical detail. The band’s dancing shoes, for the record, are from platform specialist Terry de Havilland.
ABBA’s Voyage costumes are, to some extent, “an homage to the ’70s,” yet in many ways they are unconnected to chronology because ABBA as a cultural phenomenon is bigger than its own era. “I don’t think I know one person that doesn’t know an ABBA song or won’t dance when the music comes on,” Åkerlund says, adding that the band
“represents everything in my childhood.” Music can create a shared, borderless, and intangible experience. Can digital fashion follow?
lunes, 20 de junio de 2022
Ingmarie Halling, talks about the ABBA Voyage concert
The Ray D'Arcy Show
Ingmarie Halling, Curator/ Director of the ABBA Museum in Stockholm joins Ray to talk about the ABBA Voyage concert
May 27th, 2022
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=73ymJsbwE88
domingo, 19 de junio de 2022
"It’s been 28 shows and 25 days since that night"
From ABBA The New Songs on Facebook
abba the new songs
thanks atns1
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sábado, 18 de junio de 2022
ABBA Voyage director Baillie Walsh on songs, sequins, and virtual spaces
►Baillie Walsh, director of ABBA Voyage
ABBA Voyage director Baillie Walsh on songs, sequins, and virtual spaces
Jonathan Bell — Tiempo de lectura: 12 minutos
ABBA Voyage director Baillie Walsh on songs, sequins, and virtual spaces
Baillie Walsh, the director behind ABBA Voyage, one of the most advanced entertainment spectacles ever, tells Wallpaper* how the magic happens, ABBAtars and all
Who would have thought that one of the most advanced entertainment spectacles on the planet would have originated with four septuagenarian Swedes?
‘I love a challenge,’ says Baillie Walsh, the director responsible for bringing ABBA’s new spectacular Voyage show to the stage (or screen, depending on your hankering for accuracy).
Walsh has been immersed in the music industry for most of his career, directing videos for Massive Attack, Kylie, New Order, Spiritualized and Oasis, among others, in addition to campaigns for brands like Cartier, YSL, Thierry Mugler, Sony, and Versace.
Two years ago, he got a call from ABBA’s producers, Svana Gisla and Ludvig Andersson, eager to progress the idea of a new kind of music experience based on the band’s evergreen music. Despite the quartet disbanding in 1982, their music has never really left the public consciousness, eventually bubbling triumphantly to the surface once more with the globally successful Mamma Mia! stage show and films.
The initial call was swiftly followed by a Zoom meeting with Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus themselves; Walsh got the job on the spot. ‘At that point, the idea wasn’t fully formed,’ Walsh recalls. ‘They knew they wanted to do something, but not how or what.’
The idea of a digital experience had already been in the works for a couple of years, timed to coincide with the first new ABBA music since 1981 album ‘The Visitors’.
The pandemic shuffled the whole project back by a couple of years, during which time the hunger for communal live experiences only grew and grew. Walsh says the very first question he asked himself was ‘What would I want to see? And I wanted to see something that I’d never seen before – an immersive concert experience that was believable.’
The result is ABBA Voyage, a 95-minute spectacular that takes the audience through ABBA’s career (albeit not in chronological order), using strikingly animated CGI ‘ABBAtars’ of the four members, seamlessly blended with a live band and light show.
Early on in the process, the producers engaged Industrial Light and Magic (ILM), the world’s foremost CGI specialists. ‘They knew they needed great tech people,’ says Walsh, ‘even though there still wasn’t a fully finished idea. What I wanted to know was: can you create ABBA as they were, back in the day?’
Simply showing videos or lights and animations wasn’t going to be enough, certainly not to sustain a long run. As the show gradually came together, it became clear that it would have to be a seamless blend of old and new, live and pre-recorded, analogue and digital.
The four members of ABBA drew up a setlist, effectively creating the ‘screenplay’. ‘It moved around a bit – we added and dropped a few songs,’ Walsh admits, ‘but finally I had a structure to work with.’
There then followed two motion capture shoots, including five weeks with Benny, Björn, Ana-Frid and Agnetha in Sweden, running through the performances again and again, rehearsing moves and interactions, not just during the songs themselves, but in the moments in between. It was then time for four doubles to do the routines once more and inject a bit more of the spirit and verve that the original quartet could no longer stretch to.
The award-winning British choreographer Wayne McGregor guided this process every literal step of the way. ‘Wayne took their performances and then extended them,’ Walsh explains, ‘he put [their movements] into young bodies, basically.’
ILM took this huge tranche data and modelled the four ABBAtars, drawing on the rich costumes of the era and the very latest simulation engines for hair, skin, and fabric.
‘Every thread was modelled,’ Walsh marvels, with the signature sequins and rhinestones shining brighter than ever before (it was once alleged that ABBA’s stage wear owed its outlandish styling to Swedish tax laws, which stipulated that entertainer’s costumes were only deductible expenses if they couldn’t be used as everyday clothing).
This is where the first layer of blending came in. The core of the show is a digital performance by ABBA, rendered at life size on a colossal LED screen. Made by display specialist ROE Visual, a global company with origins in China, it has a resolution of 19,536 x 3,344 pixels, or 65.3 million 2mm square pixels in total; when running at a smooth 50fps it means that 3.2 billion pixels are being processed every single second. For reference, an Apple Pro Display XDR has a resolution of 6,016 x 3,384 pixels, a total of 20.3 million pixels.
ROE’s original innovation was to create a modular display system, Magic Cube, that was designed to be demounted for easy touring, and it has also moved into the new generation of ‘virtual production’ studios that are gaining traction in Hollywood and beyond. Today’s ultra-high resolutions mean that digital backdrops can be used for live action, creating lighting and reflections that are consistent and believable.
ABBA Voyage presented a different challenge; the lighting also had to be manifested in the real world, experienced by 3,000 people, not just on the screen.
To achieve this, the virtual stage behind the CGI characters is modelled to be an extension of the real arena, with CGI lights and rigging stretching off into the ‘distance’, aligning perfectly with the real lighting rig out front. If you’re seated centre stage the illusion is seamless; there is no hint as to where the screen ends, and the arena begins.
Walsh is effusive about the design of the new temporary arena, designed by London-based entertainment specialist Stufish (opens in new tab), the company founded by the late stadium supremo Mark Fisher, an architect who directed his training towards spectacular performances by the likes of U2, The Rollings Stones, and Lady Gaga.
‘The experience really starts when you arrive outside Stufish’s arena – it’s already exciting,’ says Walsh. ‘You have to go through these tunnels of light and that’s very different to a “normal” venue. The arena design came first – I was involved only in the stage and screen.’
Walsh is somewhat underplaying his intense involvement with the project over that span of more than two years. ‘To make this real and living and breathing, we all knew it was about how the light worked,’ he says. ‘For example, in “Lay all your love on me”, there are lasers in the room, but not on the screen. However, the moving laser lights have been modelled by ILM to reflect on the digital costumes.’
Co-ordinating this immensely complex blend required a billion hours of computing time.
Behind the scenes are a tech team of 17, ensuring that the screens and lighting systems dovetail perfectly. ‘You don’t know where the digital world ends and the real world begins – it’s about blending the two,’ says Walsh. ‘All that work was decided two years ago.’
Not every song is given this naturalistic treatment; some are done using the big screens alone, with vast 10m-high projections of the band, or specially commissioned animated films. For the ballads, in particular, the intercutting and layering of shots is very reminiscent of ABBA’s pioneering video style back in the 1970s.
The overall effect is pretty remarkable. The ABBAtars themselves are seamless when viewed at distant human scale, but there’s still the light veil of CGI waxiness to the faces. For the first couple of minutes, you’re required to hike down the steep slopes of the Uncanny Valley, but it's by no means an arduous trek. By the second track, you stop wondering how it’s done and just enjoy yourself.
‘I’m interested in emotion – the idea that you could create an avatar you had an emotional response to was really important,’ Walsh says. ‘Most importantly, after the first five minutes of the show, the technology has to be the least important thing.’
Although the camera pans and zooms for the large-scale close-ups are mostly naturalistic, albeit nigh-on impossible to achieve without an army of extremely agile camera operators, there’s only one moment in the entire show when this ‘fourth wall’ is comprehensively broken. The screen flips from a bird’s-eye view of the four performers before swooping down to eye level, like Google Street View on steroids.
Other visual tricks have been deployed to maximise the realism. Walsh planned it so the ‘stage’ never goes completely dark. Between songs, and in some routines, the characters can be seen moving about in the half light of ‘backstage’, their sequins still sparkling. ‘These were important moments to keep up the belief that it was a stage, not a screen,’ he says. ‘It was a very conscious decision not to let the tech take over.’
The band, lighting crew, and tech team from ILN finally got access to the new arena in February 2022 to start rehearsals. ‘You can always tell a lot by how a crew responds,’ says Walsh. ‘We had the worlds – the music team and the film team – and when these cynical old guys got excited, then I knew we had something.’
ABBA Voyage opened in May 2022 to almost universally approving reviews and near-hysterical audience feedback. It’s a fantastic show, well worth a visit, if only to experience the true state of the art. Walsh is still involved, tinkering and tweaking. ‘I’m seeing how smoothly the show runs – it’s an enormous mechanical beast,’ he says. ‘I get quite anxious about all that data.’ He hints that setlist changes are not just possible, but planned, and the ABBA canon of nearly 100 songs means it could run and run. He admits that perhaps more than any other band, ABBA lend themselves to this new approach. The history doesn't feel forced. It's not too perfect. Very occasionally the visuals dip into obvious CGI, but Walsh and his team keep the (virtual) camera moving, using the full width of the massive stage to distract and delight.
‘What was really interesting was working directly with ABBA and reinventing them – there is nostalgia there, obviously, but you’re also bringing them up to date,’ says Walsh. ‘It’s ABBA, but it’s also 2022 ABBA.’ Having the original members working so closely on the project was also crucial. Others have noted that this sort of approach could be repurposed to bring back all four Beatles, Elvis, Bowie, Prince, any number of deceased performers.
‘It would be much more difficult to do this posthumously,’ Walsh says, and it’s true that the many occasions when stars have been digitally ‘resurrected’ feel rather less authentic and organic given the performer’s obvious lack of involvement. Whitney Houston in Vegas, Tupac Shakur, Michael Jackson, and Roy Orbison have all been given this virtual treatment, with varying degrees of success, although these recreations relied on projection, not LED screens, to generate the image.
Has an eternally young ABBA created a new kind of music experience? The Rolling Stones are currently on their 60th-anniversary tour, but there’s a very different image and ambience. ABBA Voyage works because the band can play with being frozen in time, what were once deliciously archaic costumes and hairstyles are now already well into their second or third time around the fashion block. ABBA embody memory and nostalgia, with the only scandals being ones of the heart. It’s the antithesis of the slowly maturing fine wine of the Stones’ heady brew, with its potent cocktail of drugs and debauchery, survived and transcended.
Sure, Voyage might ring just a tiny bit hollow in comparison – the adrenaline buzz has a far steeper taper than a ‘conventional’ concert. Pop music has always been about combining emotion with the state of the art, be it in sound, vision, or fashion. Voyage is a delirious fusion of them all, a consistently delicious tonic for an uncertain age.
Benny and Bjorn talked about the live band
Benny and Bjorn talked about the live band
Source ABBA Voyage
jun18th, 2022
viernes, 17 de junio de 2022
The Guardian - Podcast - Ludvig Andersson and Svana Gisla
The Guardian - Today in Focus - Podcast - Ludvig Andersson and Svana Gisla
Hannah Moore speaks to producers of the show, Ludvig Andersson and Svana Gisla and The Guardian’s head rock and pop critic, Alexis Petridis, and the Guardian’s deputy music editor, Laura Snapes
17 jun 2022
*****
miércoles, 15 de junio de 2022
ABBA Voyage: Director Baillie Walsh On Creating The New Concert Experience
ABBA Voyage: Director Baillie Walsh On Creating The New Concert Experience
By James White | Posted On14 06 2022
People:
Baillie Walsh
Bringing Swedish pop sensations ABBA back to the stage is no easy feat. Especially when you're not bringing them in person at all, but crafting a visually dazzling experience featuring life-sized digital avatars of the music legends, backed by a live band and a series of short films and other narrative concepts. Yet orchestrating it all is director Baillie Walsh, who took on the task and now tells Empire how and why he went about it.
The 95 minute concert features ABBA re-imagined as 21st-century pop stars, with costumes designed by B Åkerlund in collaboration with designers Dolce & Gabbana, Manish Arora, Erevos Aether and Michael Schmidt. Alongside some of their greatest hits (picked by the group themselves) the concert includes songs from Voyage, the band’s first album in 40 years, released last year to critical acclaim and wide success. The show takes place at the purpose-built, 3,000 seat ABBA Arena located in the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park in Stratford, East London.
Walsh is a filmmaker and music video director whose CV is full of work for musicians such as Oasis, Kylie Minogue, Massive Attack New Order, INXS, and Spiritualized, feature films including Flashbacks Of A Fool and one of the best behind-the-scenes documentaries in recent years, Being James Bond, about Daniel Craig's tenure in the role.
When he first got the call about the idea, Walsh knew he'd make a great fit for the concert. "I'm more than a fan, he says. They're part of my DNA, really. They've been part of my life forever. I saw them winning the Eurovision Song Contest, They've always been there."
Approached by producers Ludvig Andersson and Svana Gisla (the latter of whom Walsh had worked with in the past) to see if he was interested, Walsh sparked to the idea, which quickly led to contact with the group. "Svana set up a Zoom call with Benny and Bjorn, and they said yes on that call which is quite amazing," Walsh recalls. "I must've said something that they liked!"
The band's original pitch was more of a basic film idea, but Walsh had a vision for something much grander, especially since the band hadn't shared a stage in four decades. "It was the start of something," he says. "It was kind of a road map which is very useful and it kind of gave me the springboard. I felt that the possibilities were really big and we could try something very daring, something that hasn't been seen before. I thought, 'what would I want to see? What would what do? What would the experience be that I wanted to be part of?' So that was the big question and then I then I just sat down and worked out what I did want to see."
Walsh's concept was essentially the concert experience with the life-size digital versions of ABBA – Agnetha Fältskog, Björn Ulvaeus, Benny Andersson and Anni-Frid Lyngstad – brought to life through motion capture a digital doubles. Five weeks of filming with the band in Sweden wearing motion capture suits gave the basic footage for a variety of actions, while younger performers (under the supervision of choreographer Wayne McGregor) provided more movement. The two levels of performance were then blended by the tech wizards at Industrial Light & Magic.
Even with their vast experience, there were challenges to be ironed out. Getting the likenesses right with a massive challenge," admits Walsh. "That was always taking two steps forward and one step back and you think you'd found the likeness, but then in movement it didn't seem to work. And the funny thing about that was that it kept changing. So at one moment Agnetha would be very difficult to find, and then we'd we'd find her, but suddenly, Benny, who we thought we'd got, suddenly he'd go backwards."
For Walsh though, the biggest challenge was authenticity. "I didn't want this to be a technological wonderland. I wanted this to be an emotional experience and a concert. And so the technology should not be that visible, so that was that was that was a constant balancing act."
Walsh brought everything he'd done in his career before now into play for the show – combining filmmaking, music videos and more. "I couldn't have done this 20 years ago. I probably couldn't have done it 10 years ago. I used everything I had in this show."
ABBA Voyage is now playing at the ABBA Arena. For tickets and more information, see the official site. https://abbavoyage.com
martes, 14 de junio de 2022
Björn about ABBA Voyage at CNN
Björn Ulvaeus on ABBA Voyage: 'It's absolutely mind-blowing
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xnNSmlKAmkk
lunes, 13 de junio de 2022
Behind the scenes with ABBA Voyage
Behind the scenes look at the creation of video, audio, and lighting technology to support ABBA Voyage.
Solotech Inc.
13 jun 2022
Revolutionary ABBA Arena becomes the world’s largest demountable venue
Revolutionary ABBA Arena becomes the world’s largest demountable venue
ABBA returns to the stage in a temporary arena by Stufish Entertainment Architects in London, blurring lines between virtual and real worlds within a hexagonal timber-clad form.
by STIRworldPublished on : Jun 13, 2022
After four long decades away from the spotlight, ABBA, the Swedish musical quartet is returning to the stage with their revolutionary virtual tour ABBA Voyage, bridging the physical and digital in an immersive concert experience. For such a unique proposition, British practice Stufish Entertainment Architects has realised an equally innovative venue - the ABBA Arena - in East London, close to the Pudding Mill Lane DLR station. The arena has been envisioned as one of the city's top cultural destinations in the future, inviting intrigue and curiosity from passers-by with its hexagonal steel and timber form. The building is said to be the world's largest demountable structure and is set to relocate to a new site after completing its five-year tenure in the city.
The temporary structure in East London has been envisioned as one of the city’s top cultural destinations in the future | ABBA Arena | STUFISH Entertainment Architects | STIRworldThe temporary structure in East London has been envisioned as one of the city’s top cultural destinations in the future Image: Dirk Lindner, Courtesy of Stufish Entertainment Architects
Located at a strategic point along Pudding Mill Lane in East London, the ABBA Arena is surrounded by various cultural hubs along with an Olympic Park, neighbouring Hackney and Stratford - which was a key factor in the initial site selection process. The plot's proximity to public transportation makes its location far more accessible to concert-goers from all parts of the city, since, according to Stufish, a transport assessment indicated that 83 per cent of total visitors will travel to the arena primarily through public transport. From location to conceptualisation, assembly, and operation, every aspect of the project was devised to prioritise sustainable design and functional flexibility.
Modular mass timber interiors of ABBA Arena | ABBA Arena | Stufish Entertainment Architects | STIRworldModular mass timber interiors of ABBA Arena Image: Dirk Lindner, Courtesy of Stufish Entertainment Architects
Ray Winkler, CEO of Stufish Entertainment Architects, talks about the structure in a press statement: "The ABBA Arena, a portable venue, will set the standard for future shows where the physical and the digital fuse to create a new genre of experience in the physical world." Providing a truly breathtaking spectacle for its audience, the completed 25.5m high structure has a capacity of 3000; seating 1650 and providing room for a standing audience of 1350, around a stage in the centre, which generates a 360-degree show experience inside a 70m column-free space. The bold hexagonal form of the venue is softened with the introduction of timber, representing some of the material sensibilities of Swedish architecture. Standing on concrete pads, the whole arena is unified under a semi-axisymmetric steel dome, which was assembled and lifted to a height of 25.5m - an impressive engineering feat, considering how it weighs in at 744 tonnes. The venue’s roofs and walls have been developed to meet acoustic design requirements and limit the adverse effects of noise from residential areas in the structure’s vicinity. The walls themselves have two independent layers of insulated panels to optimise the thermal and acoustical performance of the external envelope. The internal structure is independent of this external form, built of mass timber to form the seating rakes and accommodate vertical circulation.
The immersive concert experience, ABBA Voyage, will bridge the physical and digital, creating a new genre of entertainment | ABBA Arena | Stufish Entertainment Architects | STIRworldThe immersive concert experience, ABBA Voyage, will bridge the physical and digital, creating a new genre of entertainment Image: Dirk Lindner, Courtesy of Stufish Entertainment Architects
Auxiliary spaces in the ABBA Arena include an open front-of-house concourse in the form of a modular hybrid glulam-steel canopy built by Stage One, alongside various CLT modules for food and beverage counters, in addition to retail areas, VIP lounges, and cloakroom spaces. Furthermore, the back-of-house services are prefabricated, permitting disassembly and relocation in the future. All the structural elements and details are designed to be easily reconfigured in new locations, in honouring the building's title as the world’s largest demountable temporary entertainment venue. Contrasting all the high-tech interior spaces, the external form comprises a lightweight bolted steel structure, fully clad with a porous screen of timber battens, emblazoned with coloured LED strip lights that integrate a huge version of the ABBA logo onto the facade design. Alicia Tkacz, a partner at the firm, says, “This unique project provided the perfect blend of architecture and entertainment, allowing us to create an amazing immersive experience for the audience that has never been seen before."
Striving to serve its audience with a new immersive experience that has never been seen before, the ABBA Arena’s design responds to its context while hosting open interior spaces that engage and welcome visitors. Steel and timber have been successfully integrated in a hybrid configuration to enhance the demountable nature of the venue. In essence, this ambitious endeavour is a testament to Stufish’s penchant for designing immersive, temporary spaces, as seen in their earlier work on the LEAPscape kaleidoscope in Saudi Arabia. The firm's integration of revolutionary architecture with entertainment to create inspirational, memorable, and new experiences for audiences and users has lalso been seen earlier in landmark set designs for major musical artists from the Rolling Stones' SIXTY tour, to Beyoncé and Jay-Z's On The Run II series of concerts, as well as the opening and closing ceremonies of the Beijing Olympics 2008, the Asian Games 2010, and now, finally, in the much anticipated ABBA Arena.
IRendered Section of the ABBA Arena | ABBA Arena | Stufish Entertainment Architects | STIRworldRendered Section of the ABBA Arena Image: Courtesy of Stufish Entertainment Architects
PROJECT DETAILS
Name: ABBA Arena
Location: London, United Kingdom
Capacity: 3000
Year of Completion: 2022
Architect: Stufish Entertainment Architects
Structural Engineer: Atelier One
M&E Consultant: Atelier Ten
QS: Gardiner & Theobald
Landscape Consultant: Jonathan Cook Landscape Architects Ltd
Acoustic Consultant: Charcoalblue
Project Manager Gardiner & Theobald
Principal Designer Gardiner & Theobald
Planning Consultant: Quod
Transport Planning Consultant: i-Transport
Main Contractor: ES Global
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