Dushow delivers for Global Citizen Live
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Serving as the main official service provider for the broadcast event which featured Ed Sheeran, Elton John, Black Eyed Peas, Christine and the Queens, Doja Cat and Måneskin, as well as special guest performances by Angélique Kidjo, Charlie Puth and Fatma Said, and raised more than US$1bn to fight climate change, famine and vaccine inequity.
Dushow partnered with its video-specialist subsidiary, Alabama, and sister company Magnum to deliver a complete technical solution encompassing audio, LED, lighting, video, cabling and power.
This tour de force was made possible thanks to the wider Novelty Magnum Dushow group offering organisers a single point of contact for the complex 20,000-person show.
This year, as part of its Recovery Plan for the World - a year-long campaign calling on governments, philanthropists and the private sector to commit financially to helping the world beat COVID-19, including funding 1bn vaccines for the poorest countries - Global Citizen planned its biggest and most ambitious show to date: Global Citizen Live 2021, a 24-hour broadcast event featuring live events across seven continents.
Screened live simultaneously from cities including New York, London, Rio de Janeiro, Sydney, Seoul, Los Angeles, Mumbai and Paris, 25 September’s Global Citizen Live was ‘the closest thing to Live Aid in the streaming age’, said John Taylor of Duran Duran, who performed at both events (in Philadelphia in 1985 and London in 2021).
Global Citizen Live Paris was staged in the heart of Paris, taking over the Champs de Mars and utilising the iconic Eiffel Tower as a spectacular backdrop.
The show featured two 79.2sq.m IMAG screens, comprising of Absen Altair (AT5 Pro) LED, flanking the stage, and Absen Polaris 3.9mm pixel pitch ‘ticker screens’ integrated into the Stusfish-designed stage which displayed messages throughout the performances. These LED screens complemented two further 4.2m x 2.4m Absen Altair LED screens on the far delay towers.
“It is a live show, of course, but we treated it as a broadcast event from the very beginning," confirms Alexandre Capponi, director of Dushow’s audio department and head of sound for the Paris Global Citizen event.
From a sound perspective, the main challenge for Dushow was the site itself, and specifically location in central Paris. “Even with an audience of this size, the fact that we are in central Paris meant we were asked to bring the sound down to 99 dBA, 3dB less than the national limit,” Capponi explains. The sound team were also prevented from using ground subs, “so, except for the front fills, we had to hang the entire system,” he adds.
“The Meyer Sound system comprised left and right hangs with clusters of 16 LEO and 12 1100-LFC subwoofers, while each of the four delay towers were equipped with 12 Lyon and six 1100-LFC”, adds Capponi, who explains that the delays had to be positioned far enough away from the stage that they wouldn’t appear in the broadcast.
Global Citizen raised more than $1.1bn in commitments to fight extreme poverty, as well as securing pledges for over 60 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines for developing countries and 157m new trees to be planted around the world.
