The CPL team headed by Simon Haydon and Lee Gruszeckyj worked closely with Jeff Whiteley from the show's producers, Inteva Productions, for the event, staged in Hall 1 of the Telford International Centre.
Inteva Productions has worked with CPL on this event since 2008 when it was a one day show for 3000 delegates. As the sales have increased and business has expanded, it has now progressed into two days with identical content with over 3500 delegates each day.
"The look of the event had remained the same for a number of years although the technical element became more ambitious each year," explains Whiteley.
This year CPL suggested modernising the projection and video design, and after consultations and meetings, it was decided to replace three front screens with a large 20mwide by 4m deep screen with the ability to move graphics, presentations and video sequences within widescreen format.
Says Whiteley, "Inteva, had every faith that CPL would deliver on the day! We gave them a free hand to come up trumps ... and they did!"
The screen was flown on one of the house trusses and fed by three of CPL's new Panasonic PT-DZ21K 20,000 ANSI Lumen HD projectors. These were flown on an advanced truss and edge blended together to form one overall image, with PiP windows of the various IMAG relays inserted at various points during the presentations.
Backed just by a starcloth, this gave the whole stage a very neat, contemporary appearance.
CPL also supplied two 14 x 8 ft relay screens flown half way down the auditorium, so that the large audience of 4000 had a good view of the stage action. These screens were each fed by a single 10K Panasonic machine.
Content for the projection was stored on two computers, one providing the backgrounds and the other the VT play-ins, PowerPoint and Keynote presentations, graphics, stings, etc.
A four camera package comprised three Sony HXC-100 HDs and a Panasonic AW-100 hot head. Two of the HXC-100s were positioned at the back of the arena, one fitted with a J72 lens for the close up shots and the other locked off for wide overall view of the stage. The third was on a balcony half way down the room with a J40 lens. The hot head was attached to one of the over-stage trusses to capture audience shots and reactions.
These were all fed into one of CPL's new compact 'fly-away' PPUs - based around the Panasonic AV-HF410 mixer - directed and cut by Lee and engineered by Simon.
A Christie Spyder X20 system was used for all the screen management and outputs to the different surfaces.
CPL also took a TX record of each camera for archiving and possible editing into a DVD in the future.
Large scale autocue projection - half way down the room - was also part of the video installation in addition to providing the standard nearfield Autocue monitors each side of the lectern. This enabled the presenters to have full freedom to move around the stage as desired ... and always be able to see the prompts.
(Jim Evans)
