EVERYTHING HAD TO BE streamlined TO GIVE A clean and immersive experience ” do it justice,” he adds. “I was the head of video/engineer on that tour.” On the following campaign, the ÷ Tour , the show designer created a video installation that wrapped around Sheeran. This tour began in arenas, but was designed to scale to play even larger venues. "We introduced IMAG screens and scaled up the height of the stage installation to play stadiums,” says Mead. However, it was on Sheeran’s Mathematics Tour that the team 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,” he says. “Everything had to be streamlined, to blend in and give the audience a clean and immersive experience. That’s not a problem when you’re filming Sheeran on a normal end- on stage, but this was in the round. We knew a camera crew with long lenses and sports jackets out on the six masts was going to break that design brief.” The next stage Mead and his team had some enormous decisions ahead, namely how production would work with no operators allowed near the stage. “In the previous tours, we’d employed four Bradley Engineering CamBall 3s and three Sony broadcast cameras, but that was no longer an option,” Mead explains. “The obvious answer was to expand on the robotics.”
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