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Tour de force The perfect symphony of on-stage robotics for a global megastar wanted to introduce video and lighting; Mead was charged with looking after both. Doing the maths However, it was on Sheeran’s Mathematics Tour that the team
P hil Mead is a video director at Colonel Tom Touring (CTT), with the enviable job of going on the road with Ed Sheeran. His big break came most unexpectedly, when he was working as head of electrics at Lighthouse, Poole’s Centre for the Arts, back in 2010. “A show designer by the name of Mark Cunniffe came into the theatre and asked me if I wanted to go on tour and work on concerts instead,” Mead recalls. “I’d spent six years at the theatre and the time had come to explore and further my opportunities.” Having worked on several tours for the likes of Stevie Wonder and Sir Elton John as a lighting tech, Mead was offered Sheeran’s + (Plus) Tour in 2011. Cunniffe
behind the scenes decided to push the boundaries even further – this time not only challenging the skills of the people involved, but also pushing the abilities of the current technology at their disposal. “The tour production team didn’t want to see any camera operators out front,” Mead continues. “Everything had to be streamlined, to blend in and give the audience a clean and immersive experience. That’s not a problem when you are filming Ed Sheeran on a normal end-on stage, but this was in the round. We knew that a camera crew with long lenses and sports jackets out on the six masts was inevitably going to break that design brief.”
The team had to raise its game, as the next project involved making video for one of the world’s best-selling artists. “The + Tour design became heavily dominated by video screens, so we took on a video director with some cameras to do it justice,” he adds. “I was the head of video/engineer on that tour.” On the following ÷ Tour , the show designer created a video installation to wrap around Sheeran. It began in arenas, but was designed to scale to play larger venues. “We introduced IMAG screens and scaled up the height of the stage installation to play stadiums,” says Mead.
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