The brief from event producers, Smyle Creative, was to provide the biggest projection display ever seen at the 15,000-capacity venue, and AV specialists QED duly obliged, filling the massive 34.5m wide by 11.9m high Harkness Hall projection canvas by deploying six Christie Roadster HD18K projectors - flown off a 25m high truss, high above the audience, via their own fast-fit custom-designed rigging system.
This tour de force enabled a host of motivational speakers (including Bootcamp founder Andrew Reynolds) to address aspiring entrepreneurs in an event held annually by the millionaire. Previously Wembley Conference Centre, The Bournemouth International Centre and The Brighton Centre have hosted Bootcamp but this is the first time it has taken place in the iconic Docklands Reynolds said: "The O2 offered great seating and wonderful audio visual opportunities so that all delegates could see the speaker presentations in comfort. It is almost as if this venue was purpose-built to the requirements of the Entrepreneurs Bootcamp format."
QED Productions director, Paul Wigfield, commented: "It is events such as this that enables us to push the technical envelope - it's what keeps us challenged and excited. Once this venue had been earmarked the idea was to make the production as large and as impressive as possible. Although we have projected onto wider surfaces in the past we have never attempted anything of this size indoors."
Smyle's production manager, Tom Cordory, gave some insight into the scale of the technical challenge. "The size of the screen was so large that it could not be assembled at ground level and flown into position, so it had to be built vertically in-situ in individual sections. The screen occupied so much space that it severely restricted the size of the cherry pickers that were able to enter and exit the arena.
"There was simply no more space left in the 02 to accommodate any larger screen. The amount of clear air space that the projectors required in order to fill the screen presented us with a whole new level of technical challenge in terms of designing and deploying both lighting and sound. To cap it all we only had one day to set up the whole event."
Projecting in 2.8:1 aspect ratio, QED used six HD18K 1080 HD High Definition DLP projectors, arranged in two triple stacked blended pairs. 105,000 ANSI lumens of projected light output was required in order for the screen to really stand out amongst all the LED, stage, camera and audience lighting.
Supplied by XL Video, the screen-base was constructed from walls of Element Labs Versa Tube and Martin LC, this was also fed from QED's Hippotizer HD media rack via DVI fibre-optic.
(Jim Evans)
