Gareth Nunns

Camera Director for Tate McRae's Miss Possessive World Tour, cutting two MEs with a large camera package integrated with CuePilot, providing a modern visual for a pop concert heavily reliant on live camera.

I collaborated closely with James Barnes, who assisted with the initial camera plot and cut, described in TPi's article on the show: The visual look of the live content came via a close collaboration between Nunns and Director, James Barnes, who was brought in via Silent House to assist with the live capture of the show. "During production rehearsals, I would make a cut of the songs and record what I had done and both James and I would hone it as well as speak to her choreographers," stated Nunns, explaining how the visual team built up the live looks of the show.

Having cut the previous tour in Australia & New Zealand, I thought this would be a great application for CuePilot as the show had many heavily choreographed timecoded tracks, as well as being a predominantly IMAG show. With support from the CuePilot team, we configured CuePilot to trigger two mixes in the Carbonite and each operator had an iPad with notes & a countdown to their upcoming shots in both MEs via an ethernet connection down the trunk of the SMPTE. With four recorders triggered by CuePilot and able to be imported, it was then great to iterate on the cuts and improve them through the tour. The CuePilot team were also responsive to feedback and multiple feature requests were added through the tour.

Due to the nature of a live show, it wouldn't always go to plan and I could easily cut over the cuts triggered by CuePilot; furthermore, not all of the show was on CuePilot, for the ad-libbed sections and spontaneous tracks in the show these were all cut manually, especially those on the elevated C stage in where Tate would perform in the round.

In addition to the main camera package, we worked closely with Ian 'Woody' Woodall from Solotech to quickly design and spec the bullet-time style circular camera array used in the US camera leg for her new song Just Keep Watching. CuePilot was great for this as we could deliver a very precise camera cut collaborating with choreographers, creatives and the artist. We had a separate switcher triggered by a dedicated Mac Mini running CuePilot for this track.

For the main cut of the show, there was extensive use of the Ross Carbonite and TouchDrive panel including use of multiple MEs, DVEs for safe zones and record overlays, multiview overlays created in pixl Grid, many Custom Controls triggered by CuePilot, animated branded test patterns created in Premiere & remote control of PTZs and network commands via Custom Commands to Companion. In addition cut the supports Benee, Zara Larsson & Alessi Rose; then managed all show records and distribution of these, plus all CuePilot records.

The tour also went through BBC Radio 1 Big Weekend, Pinkpop, iHeartRadio Music Festival & Capital Summertime Ball, where I worked with the local directors to deliver a festival show and broadcast. At R1BW & Pinkpop, I was cutting two MEs from the broadcast cameras into Disguise for effected & cropped upstage and IMAG; all of these were cut manually without CuePilot. We also integrated our tour Ronin 4D into these cuts with rehearsed moves.