Global music megastar Ed Sheeran returned to stadiums in 2022 with the Mathematics Tour – an all-new, in-the-round live experience featuring a Mark Cunniffe production design that included a colossal halo screen and six huge LED guitar picks flown around a revolving central stage.

The bold production design, initially dreamt up towards the end of the preceding Divide tour, was realised by a handpicked team of industry experts.

Evoke Studios was brought in by the tour’s creative director, Mark Cunniffe of Twotrucks Productions. “I asked Evoke Studios on board alongside a few others as this project was such a huge undertaking – too big for just my studio to deliver,” he said.

“I don’t believe a show necessarily needs 20-30 pieces of jaw-dropping content, just five or six visual moments that are especially impressive or unexpected, with the rest of the show used to build context. For this tour, I gave Evoke Studios the responsibility of creating those big moments.”

Having collaborated successfully with Cunniffe in the past, Evoke Studios – whose Mathematics Tour team is led by Vincent Steenhoek and Urs Nyffenegger – was commissioned to mastermind the video content for a total of 10 songs from the artist’s extensive repertoire, including fan favourite Bloodstream and multi-award-winning hit, Thinking Out Loud.

“For ‘our’ songs we wanted to deliver consistent quality, despite the different look of each track,” explained Steenhoek. “It’s super-complex to design content that works in-the-round, unless you choose to segment it and turn it into 2D screens again, which itself is counter intuitive. This project was both exciting and daunting at the same time.”

Twotrucks Studios used Notch and VR to show Sheeran their vision in real-time, having also used Evoke Studios’ stencilled mood boards of their 3D designs.

The team developed ideas to craft content, materials and 3D models for several applications, then imported these stencils into Notch to light and animate the scenes.

“Notch allowed us to use the same assets across all the production teams,” said Nyffenegger. “For example, in Shape of You, the rendered shapes were used for the video effects to influence the IMAG itself, the images behind the IMAG, and where it appeared on stage.

“The most considerable success of Notch in an environment like this – more so than real-time and the 3D editing capabilities – is the flexibility you have to integrate content produced offline with real-time IMAG assets and create a coherent look.”

As well as developing video content for the 10 songs, Evoke Studios, together with Matt Cromwell from Twotrucks Productions, provided playback system consultancy, disguise media server programming and workflow, and content previsualisation.

The company used motion capture and photogrammetry technology to construct a virtual model of Sheeran that could be used during the content creation process, ensuring his fans could connect just as strongly with the song-specific videos as they could by looking at the artist himself.

“The photogrammetry enabled us to create what is arguably the biggest look of the tour, in Bloodstream,” notes Nyffenegger. “The inspiration for that song’s video content came from the lyrics, which reference different chemicals flowing through veins and how they can affect you.

“We wanted to make those mental processes visible, and by being able to animate Ed’s face to a high level of detail, despite the fact that the model is heavily treated, we could really represent a whole range of emotions in a particularly striking way.”

“Bloodstream is one of Ed’s biggest live tracks,” agreed Cunniffe. “Vincent and Urs had the idea to use photogrammetry. While I wouldn’t usually propose an idea where we’d need the artist’s physical time to create a piece of content, I thought that in this instance, it was going to be worth it.

“Anyone who has seen the show can tell you that it was a risk that paid off. It’s already become a classic, iconic look for Ed.”

Steenhoek also pointed out the long-term benefits of going through the motion capture process with Sheeran, as this now gives Evoke Studios and Twotrucks the ability to take him into the Metaverse and create even more unique video looks further down the line.

The Mathematics Tour has drawn tens of thousands of fans each night across the UK and Ireland, culminating in a spectacular show at London’s Wembley Stadium on 1 July.