Novosti had been impressed by last year's Battleship Potemkin event that Farquhar-Smith produced with the Pet Shop Boys in Trafalgar Square: Flux events was approached via PR agency Brown Lloyd James to stage the piece, just six weeks beforehand: "It was a huge challenge," says Farquhar-Smith, "so we absolutely had to take it on!"
At that stage, they wanted to stage it outside, but Farquhar-Smith advised against this in view of the erratic English weather, suggesting instead the Albert Hall as a premier classical venue, and a great place to view a widescreen projection. He was also keen that Flux Events should take the event on as promoter, as well as production company: "With such a short time between getting the green light and booking an available and appropriate date for the Hall, it was the only logical way it was going to happen," he says. "We needed to be able to make all the major staging and production decisions quickly and decisively."
Lighting requirements would be minimal: "The whole focus of the piece was on listing to the music, watching the film and being enrapt by the experience," explains Farquhar-Smith. For projection, he turned to XL Video and Malcolm Mellows, who also worked with him on Potemkin and numerous other productions. XL supplied two Barco ELM R18 projectors with 3.2 - 5 zoom lenses, which were set up to run overlaid images. Playback was from a Betacam SP machine, and the footage was downloaded from the computers of the two Russian video technicians, Viktor Goltsman and Pavel Grigoryev.
The 72-minute film was created by director Georgy Paradzhanov from amalgamated extracts from Russian and German newsreels, archives and documentary film, creating an impresssionary narrative. The visuals were manually manipulated in real-time by Paradzhanov. Last-minute edits had to be made to the footage on-site to ensure live synchronization with the music. XL's two technicians were John Edwards and Kevin Parry. The 13.2 x 10m screen is owned and was supplied by Flux Events.
Although the orchestra played acoustically, the central cluster of the house sound system was utilized for playback sound from the opening sequence of the film, and this element was coordinated by Grif Hewis from Sound By Design.
Gallowglass were employed to do the security, providing four invaluable Russian speakers in their team - key to making the whole event run smoothly, said Farquhar-Smith. The Rigging Partnership - Gavin Weatherall and Ollie Green - were brought in to handle that aspect, and Flux worked closely with Simon Lupini Head of the RAH's Show Department.
Edwin Shirley's did the trucking and Eat To The Beat the catering. Local crew were supplied by CrewCo and all the heath and safety elements were co-ordinated by Tim Roberts from the Event Safety Shop.
