CT enables live video for Special Olympics
- Details
The Opening Ceremony took place at Zayed Sports Stadium in Abu Dhabi on 14 March. Thousands of people from fans, families, heads of state and the Crown Prince Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan filled the stadium to watch this event unfold. The show featured performances from the Global Unified Choir, DJ Paul Oakenfold, Avril Lavigne and Luis Fonsi to name a few.
CT worked alongside its client People to deliver all live video aspects of both the opening and closing ceremony for this prestigious and heart-warming event.
CT supplied a 600sqm upstage screen, a total of 270sqm relay screens, 580sqm LED Floor, 90sqm tracking screen, and 2500sqm of mapped floor projection using RZ31k Panasonic Laser projectors.
The impressively large 600sqm LED screen was placed directly opposite the VIP box where the crown prince and heads of state sat, and the relay screens were strategically positioned around the arena to ensure all attendees didn’t miss a thing. The floor LED was integrated into the main stage construction, creating a 6m wide “doughnut” display area some 32m in diameter, which was then covered with a white projection material diffuser.
Dan Hughes, CT’s senior project manager, explains, “There was a central circular stage, and outer ring stage which we projected onto and an inner ring of 8mm LED joined the two surfaces. We used a white diffusion on the LED to open up the viewing angle of the screen fully. The white diffusion also served to turn the LED screen into a matching white surface, so it appeared as one full area instead of a black/negative ring in-between two white stages.”
A key feature of the Opening Ceremony production was a 10m diameter flying disc, Weighting nearly five tons, the disc incorporated lighting, pyro and, impressively, a 9m diameter LED screen. The disc rose up 30m from the stage at the start of the show and tracked back over the main LED screen, relaying show content throughout to enhance the floor projections. At the climax of the ceremony, the two torch bearing athletes travelled on board the disc as it flew back to its centre stage position.
Tom Stocks, CT’s senior video engineer, says, “For the LED we utilised our new HDMI 2.0 & 12G SDI kit to maintain a fully redundant 4k @60 4:4:4 uncompressed workflow from the media server to screen. In the field, we had a remote Screen Management system comprised of linked Barco E2 and S3s managing all LED scaling and mapping.”
All Projection, LED control and Image Processing was integrated on a centralised fully redundant network ring controlled from FOH and utilised CT’s new 1G and 10G fibre networking solutions.
The Special Olympics World Games came to an end on 21 March with a spectacular closing ceremony full of entertainment and celebrations. Nicole Scherzinger opened the show, and Keala Settle ended it with a dramatic performance of This is Me from The Greatest Showman.
(Jim Evans)
