The Opening Ceremony for the Games was held at ANZ Stadium with Jands Production Services providing the audio gear and crew. Out There Productions was appointed to produce the opening and closing ceremonies for the Games which featured the largest athlete's parade on earth and artists such as David Campbell, Jessica Mauboy, Leo Sayer, John Paul Young and the NSW Police Marching Band.
The performance stage featured a JBL VerTec PA system comprising of two strips of 15 deep on the front hangs with the side hangs consisting of seven one side and eight on the other.
"The reason why they are uneven is that the northern stand has an extra tier so I needed a bit more dispersion to reach the top tier," explained Michael Waters, sound designer for the event. "We also used five 'speaker carts' of delays, three of which had three VerTec 4889 speakers stacked and, to make up the balance as that was the entire VerTec 4889 stock used up, we had the smaller VerTec 4888 speakers for side delay distribution. There were two carts of these with four speakers stacked on each."
The weather was extremely unpredictable with high winds, heavy rain and also strong sunshine. "We actually couldn't leave anything alone for more than about an hour as the weather just kept changing - it was covers on, then covers off and it was really painful," said Waters. "The weather just was not on our side although luckily it was fine for the show and the load out. The whole set up and rehearsal period was nothing but grief thanks to the weather.
"However the VerTec system performed really well especially the carts acting as tower-less delay towers. There were strict budget constraints on the Games so we couldn't install substantial delay towers or hang off the canopy but the carts were great. In fact they did the job exceptionally well."
(Jim Evans)
