LIVE EARTH LONDON

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last couple of months, or were more interested in Wimbledon or a rare opportunity to sunbathe, you’ll know that Live Earth dominated the news on Saturday 7 July.

    On this one day, over 150 musical artists performed at concerts held in London, New Jersey, Washington D.C., Rio de Janeiro, Hamburg, Sydney, Johannesburg, Tokyo, Kyoto and Shanghai [plus a comparatively tiny one in Antarctica that played to a sell-out crowd of 17], attracting an estimated worldwide TV and radio audience of two billion as well as breaking the record for online viewing.

    Unlike Live Aid and Live 8, which focused on famine relief and the eradication of poverty, Live Earth sought to raise awareness of our planet’s climate crisis and influence an ecological turnaround.

    Initiated by former U.S. Vice President Al Gore — the man behind the motivating documentary film, ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ — Live Earth kick-started a three-year campaign to combat climate change and advocate environmentally-sustainable living. Working with Gore on the project was SOS (Save Our Selves — founded by Live Earth’s executive producer Kevin Wall), the Alliance for Climate Protection, MSN, and Control Room, the company which produced and globally co-ordinated the event. Harvey Goldsmith was also involved, partnering Kevin Wall to oversee numerous aspects of the international shows.

    Each Live Earth venue was not only designed to maintain a minimum environmental impact, but showcased the latest state-of-the-art energy efficiency, on-site power generation, and sustainable facilities management practices.

    As worldwide production manager Nick Levitt told us, all through the run-up to July 7, he was mentally ticking off 'green boxes’ for every decision he made. “I’ve been working on this since February and my brief was to find the venues, identify the local promoters and production managers, and ensure that each country is toeing the line in terms of the show design.

    “The initial guideline document produced by John Rego, the environmental director of Live Earth’s Green Team was taken round to each promoter, and then John and his team followed that up with the necessary support to keep the events as green as possible.”

    Rather than use up a lot of paper to document every one of the events around the world, this report will focus on the London show which, conveniently, was the template for everywhere else.

    Including London, four of the events were promoted by Live Nation; all came under the worldwide production management of Nick Levitt and variously employed a generic, eco-friendly visual design by Ray Winkler of the Mark Fisher Studio and Patrick Woodroffe, with assistance from Adam Bassett.

    Featuring more than 20 leading stars including Madonna, Foo Fighters, Genesis, Razorlight, Snow Patrol, Black Eyed Peas, Duran Duran, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Keane, Metallica, James Blunt and the brilliantly silly Spinal Tap, Live Earth London was the fourth live music event to be staged at the new Wembley Stadium and came a week after the venue had hosted another major multi-artist show, The Concert For Diana.

     Backstage, Live Nation’s event manager was suffering, he said, from ‘Wembley-itis’. “I’m slightly delirious; I’ve been here for two weeks solid and it’s beginning to feel like I’ve never been anywhere else!

    “All through the load-in, we’ve had to work out what the carbon footprint is of every crew member coming to work each day. It’s been that intense, plus the venue is rammed. We’ve used every bit of space here at the Stadium for storage, dressing rooms, prepping, you name it! There’s even people working in toilets!”

    It was agreed between the various suppliers — including Britannia Row, PRG Europe, Stageco, Summit Steel’s rigging team, set construction firm Steel Monkey, XL Video, Fleetwood Mobiles and Power Logistics — that the main elements of the Peter Bingham-designed Diana production would remain for Live Earth to allow a smoother run up to the big day on July 7.

    As Nick Levitt explained: “In fact, a lot of site infrastructure elements were also shared with Muse and Metallica [playing on July 8], and the main structural difference between the Diana gig and this one was to turn the Stageco roof around 180° because for Diana they had a cantilever at the back for the orchestra.”

    Stageco’s project manager Dirk de Decker, along with crew chiefs Wies Baeten and Steff Angillis, worked with site co-ordinator Albert Lawrence, the Live Nation team and production management to plan and execute the stage build.

    Said de Decker: “We set the ‘revolve’ used by Live Earth [supplied by the Revolving Stage Company] into the stage floor before the Diana concert, so time was saved the following week. Within 36 hours of the Diana show, the stage had been made ready for Live Earth’s load-in.”

    For both concerts, Stageco provided 1500m2 of deck, giving 1000m2 of covered stage, plus three delay masts, auxiliary ramps and stairs. Stageco also provided the stages at Giants Stadium and in Hamburg.

    The all-important backdrop to the 52m wide Wembley stage was replicated in different but similarly symbolic ways in other countries to promote a sense of universality.

    Set designer Ray Winkler commented: “I needed to translate the event’s message into a language that was legible to the audience. My first reaction to Kevin Wall’s brief was to make it look green as well as be green. That was tricky because a lot of what we knew to be green — such as the bio-diesel power — would be hidden away from view. So I looked at finding something that was iconic and a comment on our carbon consumer culture.”

    He settled on building a backdrop wall out of 495 recycled oil drums, each of which was inset with Saco LED fixtures that were fed video inputs from XL Video’s playback system.

    “The oil drums that were used in London and Rio, and the tyres in the New Jersey, Japan and Australia shows, were good examples that would allow me to form a dot matrix rendition of the world. The message was that all of these materials along with all the plywood would either be re-used or recycled, and that we would only use environmentally-friendly paints.

    “We found that there’s an entire industry in the U.S. that takes tyres and shreds them for all kinds of industrial purposes. So that’s where all our tyres went!”
    
LIGHTING
Patrick Woodroffe approached the lighting design in much the same way as Winkler handled the set, whereby his core design was adapted by each venue’s local LD. For obvious reasons, Woodroffe avoided specifying a huge lighting system and instead used under half of the equipment he would normally spec for a stadium rock show.

    He said: “The main aim was to have very little incandescent light and use as many LED sources as possible to firstly prove it could be effective as an main alternative on this scale.

    “We did a little shoot-out down at PRG in Greenford to see the range of LED sources that were currently available. People from Martin, i-Pix, PixelRange and Easily LED were all together in the same room and I just suggested that they all be involved to demonstrate that the industry is quite serious about this and that there's huge potential in using these kinds of fixtures.

    “All the manufacturers gave their products for free and I think it was a very positive thing to have achieved.”

    Since the event was sponsored by Philips, Woodroffe’s plan was to use standard household fluorescent lighting above the stage. To make this idea work in a non-domestic concert situation, Philip Norfolk, PRG Distribution’s commercial director, put a Pathway control system between the Wholehog II controller and extension wing and the lamps, converting the desk’s DMX output into control information which the lamps’ ballasts would understand.

    With these lamps, Woodroffe created six ‘Ecoclusters’. Norfolk explained: “Patrick took 24 A-rated for efficiency lamps and hung them from the inside of half an oil drum, which was then covered with a translucent black gauze and suspended above the stage. We fixed the ballasts inside the drums then wired the bulbs, via the Pathway, to the control desk. This is the first time Pathway has been used for this kind of application.”

    Keeping in line with the green directive, Martin LED Stagebar 54Ls — RGB, amber and white pixel bars — were chosen to line the front of the Wembley stage to uplight the artists.

    Twenty-four of i-Pix’s new BB LED wash units  — containing Lamina solid state lights — were mounted on the front truss header and used instead of eight traditional light blinders. Using the BBs in this role enabled a six-fold reduction in power — the units consumed a total of just 76.8 Amps on full power, compared with 497.8 Amps, had the conventional route been taken.

    Woodroffe and TV lighting director Mark Kenyon also chose 86 i-Pix Satellite LED fixtures to rig on horizontal trusses and vertical side trusses framing the proscenium arch. On full power, these 86 heads consumed a mere 14.91 Amps. The BB and Satellite units were run from a Catalyst system via the Wholehog II operated for the show by Nigel Catmur and Will Charles.

    PixelRange also featured heavily in the LED spec, which included 123 PixelLine Micro washes, 54 PixelLine 1044s and 37 PixelPar 90s.

    EasilyLED was also invited to contribute 10 of its units, but as director Dr. Chris Crockford explained: “We could have done it but we determined that to get all the components supplied in time would have meant our carbon footprint was so great it would fly in the face of what the event was about. So we declined.”

    Whilst much precedence was given to LED technology, conventional concert lighting did get a look in via a number of 1500W Vari*Lite VL3500, VL5 and Martin MAC 2000 wash luminaires and four 5kW Syncrolite B52s, plus a blend of smoke and mist effects from DF-50s, a Jem fogger, Le Maitre Stadium Hazer and Cirro Strata. The audience lighting from the Diana concert was retained for Live Earth and featured 50 VL3000 spots, 10 Gargantuans and 60 PAR 64 ACLs.

    Interestingly, Woodroffe is not the biggest user of LED products but their performance at Live Earth inspired him for many reasons. He commented: “I’d previously used LED fixtures like Palcos either as footlights or as small floods to light awkward pieces of scenery when you wanted to avoid using large Molefays with colour changers.

    “Andi Watson was one of the first LDs I’d noticed using LED sources for making interesting patterns when he did Radiohead. When you use them sensibly you can really make an impact, such as when we made a Molefay from LED modules and we lit up the whole of Wembley with just 12 of them. I can see a time when, for creative and social reasons, LED fixtures take precedence and it’s exciting.”

    For the first time since the Queen’s Golden Jubilee in 2002, Woodroffe worked alongside Mark Kenyon. ”Mark obviously has great television experience, but he and his team also have a very instinctive sense of music and performance. It was a very rewarding collaboration and in this case the whole was definitely greater than the sum of the parts.”

    While lighting hoists and trusses were part of PRG’s kit supply, the remaining rigging hardware and services came from Summit Steel, chiefed by head rigger Chris Walker.

Summit provided a number of Lodestar hoists including a number controlled by Andy Beller using the Kinesys Elevation 1 and Vector software. The truss frames for the oil drums were split into two sections, with the lower half (under the centre video strip) on Kinesys Vari-speed motors to enable this section to fly in and out when the revolving stage moved for changeovers.

SOUND MATTERS
No stranger to large, historic events, Britannia Row director Bryan Grant was in a fine mood towards the end of a frantic week. He said: “Two years ago, we did Live 8 and I didn’t think it’d ever get as big as that. But with Live Earth following the Diana concert within a week, you could say things have stepped up a gear!

    “With both events everyone came with the right spirit — that’s what makes it work. It gives our crew the buzz and makes a tough day a great day.”

    Brit Row installed an Electro-Voice X-line main PA containing 56 XVLS/Ts and 48 subs with extensive delay and fill systems (74 Outline Butterfly hi-packs and 24 Subtech 218 subs, powered by Outline T Series amps) around the stadium, as well as tapping into the EAW/Peavey MediaMatrix house delay system to cover the upper tiers.

    “The stadium might be brand new, but it’s still a big old bowl as far as sound reinforcement is concerned,” said Grant. “We have to work to minimise the inevitable reflections off that enormous roof and get as much direct field audio to the entire audience as possible. When the roof was turned around after the Diana show, we had to re-do the system time alignment so I thank the house technicians for working so closely with us.”

    Crew chief John Gibbon commented: “The only difference compared to the Diana PA rig is that we have flown subs for this show because the weight loading on the roof has been reduced due to the more eco-friendly lighting rig.”

    As on Live 8, stage manager Steve Jones presided over the revolving stage system to facilitate quick band changeovers, with an A/B set-up of splits, and FOH and monitor systems. Two DiGiCo D5 Live consoles sat at FOH with engineers Chris Coxhead and Chris Morrison at the A and B consoles respectively. Mike ‘Bunny’ Warren operated the show/presenter console. DiGiCo’s Tim Shaxson sat at a further (offline) D5 that was used by guest engineers to check their settings.

    In addition to the DiGiCo desks, a Yamaha PM1D was used for presenters, the B stage and acoustic spots. Big Mick Hughes used his Midas XL8 for Metallica and Dave Rat piloted a Midas Verona for the Chili Peppers. “Both bands are managed by Q-Prime and I guess they are big Midas fans!” said John Gibbon.

    All the consoles, plus another D5 specifically for Madonna, were fed into a DiGiCo D1, the routing board for the PA system.

    Systems engineers for the event were Sherif el Barbari, Nico Royan and Davide Lombardi. “Absolutely everything came down to the D1,” explained el Barbari. “All of the band mixes came to the D1 and from there I sent them to the Dolby Lake matrix system and on to an Iris system, which gave me total control.”

    Down in monitor world, where Turbosound TFM-450 wedges reigned, DiGiCo’s Roger Wood had the task of prepping the sessions for the two D5s on the main A-B flip-flop, while Brit Row’s Jon Lewis, Ben Phillips and Graham Blake were on hand to assist guest engineers.

    Other monitor desks playing a part were a PM1D for Genesis, another Verona for the Chilis and an XL4 for Metallica who were taking over a large part of the production for their own show the following day.

    Sennheiser had a huge presence on both Diana and Live Earth and all the presenters and a large proportion of the artists used its mic and IEM products, although as Gibbon pointed out, there were also a few Shure endorsees amongst the bill and Beyer mics in use.

    The Brit Row crew were especially pleased to have the expertise of Sennheiser’s director of engineering, Dave Hawker, and chief engineer, Andy Lillywhite on site for both shows to handle any mic and in-ear issues.

    “Sennheiser is very good on these shows,” explained Brit Row director Mike Lowe. “They really rise to the occasion. People like Dave and Andy know all our radio techs and we work really well together with them.”

    Every wireless personal monitor used on-stage at Wembley was a Sennheiser evolution wireless G2 system, and each of the presenters, which included Chris Rock, Ricky Gervais, Eddie Izzard and Rob Reiner, used a Sennheiser SKM 5200 wireless mic.

    Ollie Nesham had spent the week after the Diana show re-configuring the Fleetwood Mobiles truck — Fleetwood One — and interfacing it with all the other broadcast units on site.

    All the mic signals were fed to the truck by Brit Row from an area under the stage known as ‘underworld’ where, said director Tim Summerhayes, “there was the most amazing array of splitters I have ever seen. There were thousands of them, delivering the feeds to the various trucks, PA consoles and TV studios.”

    The broadcast mixes were organised on a strict A/B system whereby one truck would handle the band that was on air, using system A, while the other truck would be preparing the next band using system B. Fleetwood One and the BBC Mobile alternated in these responsibilities. The final mix was then fed to the television broadcast truck where they added the presentation element, fading between the two trucks as necessary.

    For Brit Row, the massive task of distribution was handled by John Gibbon and Mark Isbister, and feeds were co-ordinated for Fleetwood by Matt Wood.

    Brit Row, like all suppliers, followed the event’s green guidelines as rigidly as possible. As John Gibbon advised: “We’re recycling batteries; we’re running at 107.5V instead of 110V, and trying to do the best and cleanest job we can.”

VIDEO

Co-ordinating all the video elements between supplier XL Video and the various designers and producers of screen content, was screen producer Chris Saunders.

    Although XL already had also a large video system installed at Wembley for the Diana concert, this all had to be removed in the meantime. Some kit from that system was then re-installed for Live Earth along with several new and different video elements.

    Flanking both sides of Stageco’s stage were two I-Mag screens made up from 9x7 modules of Lighthouse R16 LED. Onstage, across the centre at the back, XL supplied a 74 panel wide x four panel high ‘banner’ strip of Barco I-12 LED on Summit Steel’s half-tonne hoists.

    XL’s playback system consisted of four HD Doremi hard drives controlled by a Barco Events Manager that was programmed by Richard Turner with material supplied by Live Earth’s HQ in New York. It also supplied a machine to beam SMS messaging, slogans, facts/figures and calls to action across the on-stage banner screen.

    For I-Mag, XL supplied five GV LDK 8000 HD cameras and I-Mag video director Blue Leach — who did the same job on the Diana show — cut the live screen mix using a GV Kayak HD mixer/switcher. Feeds from five BBC cameras along with live satellite feeds from around the world were also available on the XL mixer. The BBC’s live broadcast mix was directed by Richard Valentine.

    In true off-beat Blue Leach style, the image manipulation facilities of two of XL’s Catalyst digital media servers (operated by Simon Pugsley) were utilized in the slightly idiosyncratic role of affecting the camera signals — similar to a DVE. The signal came out of the PPU and was encoded in HD and effected within Catalyst, before being output to the screens from there by Leach.

    XL used an HD EVS to record and playback the international satellite feeds. It was also the playback device for all VTs in the venue — as well as being used to roll the Madonna playback to time code.

THEY ALSO SERVED...
The events in London, New Jersey and Sydney, plus the satellite Live Earth Alert! show in Amsterdam, used a combined total of 1200m of Mojo Barriers’ aluminium or steel barrier systems.

    Other key contractors included the omnipresent GLD (ambience & dressing room décor), Flying Saucers (catering), Show & Event Security, Redburn Transfer (trucking) and MBA (travel), while the entire event was powered by environmentally-friendly bio-diesel supplied by Power Logistics.

    Aside from the technical challenges, Nick Levitt cited accreditation as the biggest headache. “With more than 20 artists, up to 15 presenters, 600 crew, 400 BBC people — and yourself — it all adds up to a major responsibility. The solution, as always, is to make the system as simple to understand as possible for security.

    “Artist liaison, of course, is another big challenge on an event like this, with so many people coming and going. All our artist transport has been provided by Smart Cars, an official partner, and we have the new BlueTec Mercedes and Sun Diesel vehicles — about 60 cars and 10 minibuses in total, all run on eco-friendly fuel.”

    Live Earth did not pass without criticism. From a performance perspective, several artists and presenters seemed well out of their depth and unable to carry the serious message with credibility. The Daily Mail, which editorially tore into the event with intense negativity on the morning of the show, reported that artists and their entourages flew the equivalent of nine times the circumference of the world in order to perform, contributing to a carbon footprint of more than 31,500 tonnes — and that’s not counting the TV audience.

    While a BBC viewer was moved to complain online, “Would you hold a hog roast to promote vegetarianism?”, one commentator claimed that Live Earth was no less than “a massive, hypocritical fraud". The Who’s frontman, Roger Daltrey was particularly scathing. He said: “The last thing the planet needs is a rock concert... the questions and the answers are so huge, I don't know what a rock concert's ever going to do to help.”

    The easiest option, as always, would be to do absolutely nothing and hope that the problem goes away or someone else will sort it out. If Al Gore really is telling us the truth about what’s happening to our planet, then it’s our children and grandchildren who will inherit the rotten fruits of our apathy.

    If Live Earth only made us think a little harder about the effect our daily life — and indeed, this industry — has on the environment, then Mr. Daltrey, it was absolutely worth doing.