The awards are voted for solely by travel agents, and the event is widely regarded as the pinnacle of the travel industry calendar. Hence production company, Three Media Creative (Three MC), designed a highly creative technical infrastructure that would befit the occasion, which was hosted by comedian Jimmy Carr.
Manchester-based A to V had been introduced to the event by local VT house Editz, who were assisting Three MC with the content for the show.
Working alongside Three MC's creative director, Steve Csanyi, A to V rigged three stacked pairs of projectors to fire onto a 40ft x 10ft edge blended main screen, while the remaining four projectors fired onto four further 12ft x 6.9ft screens, which were formed into a cube, and suspended from the ceiling.
This required flexibility on the part of the service company, as the cube had only been introduced to the production at the very last minute at the request of the main sponsor.
With HSL providing the lighting, including over 40 moving heads and a Colourweb LED lighting backdrop, A to V's Allan Hindley knew the projectors needed to be both bright and accurate.
"We had taken the precaution of double stacking the projectors for each segment of the blended area," he stated. "However, with the cube I wanted to keep a similar level of brightness - and I realised that by doubling up on the main screen this would have been too high. The Christies were sufficiently bright to ensure that we didn't need to use the doubles and I'm glad I took that decision, since it effectively gave us hot back-ups for the main screen."
To cover the five hour production, A to V fielded a four-camera HD PPU. The background content was delivered from a Hippotizer media server. "We used four discrete outputs from the Hippotizer to feed the processor, which then delivered the graphics and camera images as overlaid PIPs to the main screen and the cube."
Additional entertainment was provided by world champion street dance group Flawless, X Factor finalist Rebecca Ferguson, and Radio 1 DJ Trevor Nelson, while the audience was also treated to a condensed version of the musical Les Miserables.
(Jim Evans)
