American Rapper Logic, toured North America with a visually ambitious show using 2 Avolites Ai servers to drive responsive, immersive content to multiple LED surfaces.
Production design, programming and Notch content for the tour was masterminded by Visual Endeavors’ Creative Director, Aron Altmark.
Logic’s Bobby Tarantino vs Everybody tour takes in performances at some of North America’s most famous venues, including NYC’s Madison Square Garden, the LA Forum and Las Vegas’s Park Theater.
“We have a number of custom servers that we’ve built up for interactive and media server duties over the past year, and our Avolites Ai servers for the Logic tour are based around this robust build — namely, Intel i7 8th-gen hexacore processors coupled with Nvidia GTX 1080Ti GPUs and lots of PCIe solid-state memory,” said Altmark. “There are 2 servers on the tour for full backup capabilities, and each has an Ai Bondi and Notch Playback licence attached.”
Visual Endeavors’ design for the show is based around a 15’ x 15’ riser centre stage, with built-in lighting and lasers overhead, and 1 massive 50’ x 25’ upstage LED surface, as well as side IMAG screens. There are vertical towers flanking the stage, with large angled trusses overhead, loaded with fixtures.
“Our brief was a design aimed at creating an architectural environment on stage for Logic to perform in, on, and around,” Altmark continued. “This environment is comprised of technical elements that allow for reactive and immersive content and experiences for the audience and performers on stage alike. All of the lighting, video and content combine to create a unified visual canvas that is as dynamic as Logic’s music and personality on stage.
“Our Notch integrations for Logic are all IMAG-effects — Avolites Ai’s Notch implementation allows us to programme the Notch effects much more seamlessly from the Ai profile on our lighting control console,” Altmark explained. “In the programming process, we dedicated a single layer of each video surface to Notch effects, such that we can always call up effected IMAG and interweave it in the show.
The majority of the show is run using a Linear Timecode (LTC) feed that goes through a Brainstorm SR-112 Distripalyzer directly into the Avolites Ai servers via line-in.
“LTC allows us to really dig into the music and hit very nuanced accents — we had previously programmed almost 30 songs from the last year of Logic tours, and with this basis we could quickly get the programming accomplished for the 50 plus universe rig for the current tour’s additional 20 plus songs,” said Altmark.
“With the form factor of our servers, LTC via line-in was the most direct way without adding another piece of hardware into the mix, and Ai implemented some new features for us during this process to make playback easy to adjust for global offset/delay. Lighting, media, and lasers are all locked to timecode and run from the consoles, which makes the show unified and engaging.”
Altmark worked with UK-based multimedia outfit COMIX to provide visual content for the screens. All lighting, media, and laser programming is handled by Altmark and Dan Norman, who is out with the tour as lighting director/server operator. The Avolites Ai servers, licenses, and Notch licenses were supplied by Visual Endeavors.