West End Eurovision 2011
WEST END EUROVISION 2011 - in aid of The Make A Difference Trust.
This late night show sees West End shows competing against each other singing past Eurovision songs, aiming to win the votes of both the audience and this year’s celebrity judging panel were: Sheridan Smith, Justin Lee Collins and Graham Norton. Special guests were The Original Bucks Fizz.
Each year, the show seems to grow in size. In previous years, each performing show has been staged on top of the Grease set which meant all performances looked very similar. This year, the production manager suggested looking into an LED wall to give a unique feel to each show. After several initial meetings with Blitz, the hire company brought on board to very kindly supply all the video equipment, we decided upon a light-weight, medium resolution, semi-transparent LED surface. The modular design meant it was very quick to assemble, which suited the very tight production schedule.
The final LED surface size was 8m x 6m, suspended on ladder beam by 16x 1m steels. The ladder beam was suspended by two 1/2t chain hoists. As Grease had to perform on the night of the event, the LED would have to be gridded and brought in during the beginning of the event. The LED has a pixel pitch of 30mm, therefore an overall resolution of 266x200pixels. Creating content for the LED involved various rehearsal visits to each show along with conversations with the lighting designer, Humph McDermott, in the months leading up to the event. All content was created in Photoshop, Illustrator, After Effects and Cinema 4D. This was programmed and operated on Catalyst, by Jon Lyle.
In addition to the LED, there was a heavy use of projection. Two 10k Panasonic PT-DW1000E were overlaid, rigged on the circle front, to create a 5m wide 16:9 image on a flown projection screen. This was used heavily in between each act to show a live camera feed from sub-stage, each shows video ident, the scoreboard and various event video idents and video clips.
Four video relay monitors were installed – one in the judges box, one with the DSM and two substage, to show live camera feeds, scoreboard and video idents to performers, judges and crew. Footage was supplied by three Sony Z1’s around the theatre. A Sony D50 was used to capture the judges for projection.
This year we used DVI over Fiber around the whole building, which cut down on installation time, and drastically improved video quality, compared to previous years.
Video control was by an Edirol V440HD, due to its ability to easily mix between sources and access to effects & processing. This fed two ImagePro’s, one for projection and one for the monitors around the theatre. When the projection screen was flown out, an ImagePro was faded to black, so we could mix for the relay monitors. Local monitoring was via a Barco ViewScape, to cut down on space, all the preview monitors were fed to one 30” LCD. A DV deck recorded the feed from the Sony D50 for the video production team, headed by Jane Garfield from Proud to Present.
The scoreboard was operated by Kit Milsom, using my custom software, written specifically for this event. Show panel data was collected and validated backstage. Text data was collected through a web portal. The data was input to the scoreboard live, using the validated data to confirm any anomalies.
 David Pendlebur... |
 Legally Blonde... |
 The Audience |
 Dr Belond being... |
 The Costume Win... |
 Legally Blonde... |
 The Original Bu... |
 Costume Winners |
 Dr Belond being... |
 Special Award |
 Legally Blonde... |
 Legally Blonde... |
 Legally Blonde... |
 Dr Belond being... |
 Costume Winners |
 MAD Trust Staff |