A specialist team from XL Video was dispatched to the 2011 Glastonbury Festival to co-ordinate the first ever ‘mapped projection’ onto three sides of the legendary Pyramid Stage structure. The visual spectacular took place whilst Coldplay performed their latest release, "Every Teardrop is a Waterfall" as the finale to their Saturday night headline set.
The epic story started with a discussion between Coldplay’s production manager Wob Roberts and XL Video director Des Fallon some months previously. “The initial inspiration came from Coldplay's creative director Phil Harvey after seeing XL’s mapping of the Ralph Lauren building in London,” said Roberts. “Once the team had demo’d the concept to all of us, the band confirmed that they wanted to go ahead with it as a show-stopping effect for this year's Glasto.”
Concepts for the projection were first shown to the Coldplay team using live server feeds into Cast’s WYSIWIG software, which allowed a 3D visualisation of how the projection might look. As the project progressed a 1:50 scale model of the Pyramid Stage provided a ‘real’ surface for test visuals.
