The event's appointed technical director Nick Eltis together with designer Paul Collison and audio designer Scott Willsallen were given an immense challenge by the Singapore Government: the event was to be the best audio and lighting extravaganza in the republic's history.
The NDP 2007 show comprised of five segments, Sea, Earth, Sky, People and Fire, weaved together by a central character SING, which symbolized the tremendous willpower and bountiful energy of Singapore and its people. The show was supported by a 240-strong NDP 2007 Orchestra, which was comprised of the Singapore Symphony Orchestra, the Singapore Chinese Orchestra, Malay and Indian Ensembles, talented local soloists and the Singapore Armed Forces (SAF) Central Band, who fused together traditional ethnic and contemporary sounds. The impressive fireworks finale was synchronized to specifically composed piece of music, and also integrated water effects, flames, lasers and lights. The parade itself would be over in three hours and also included an impressive military theme provided by repelling soldiers, boats, helicopters and fighter jets.
The closure of The National Stadium, which had been home to the event for over 30 years, forced the building of a new venue. The NDP's floating platform designed for the parade took eight months to build. The final plan consisted of four impressive building stages, including specifically designed joints and connections that would follow the tides of the bay. The building plan also included a 200m 27,500-person capacity seating area along the shoreline. It is the largest floating performance platform in the world, and also featured an internal drainage system, cabling systems and lightning conductors for safety purposes.
For audio designer Scott Willsallen, the sheer size of the floating platform proved a challenge among others. The 110m wide and 80m deep platform was set 30m back from the 200m wide seated promenade, and it floated on water with rising and lowering tide, altering the height, and hence the coverage of the speaker systems. "I really looked at all possible suppliers but I concluded that the Adamson Y10 loudspeaker system would provide the broad, deep coverage pattern required for the application" explained Willsallen.
His design featured two scaffolding towers with 24 Y10's flown on each side, four ground stacked Y10 arrays, each consisting of eight enclosures were placed in front of the scaffolding towers. The two central ground stacked Y10 clusters were flanked by 12 EV X-subs in a tapered array and the outer Y10 clusters were supplemented by six T-21 Subs per side. The entire system was powered by 75 Lab.gruppen fP6400 amplifiers and 9 Dolby Lake processors. The installation stayed in place for three months before the NDP event, during which it was fine-tuned and used for the extensive rehearsal period.
Local supplier Showtec, with the assistance of the Australian company Norwest, provided all the speaker systems specified by Willsallen. The audio team included local and Australian engineers and technicians including audio project manager Chandra Mohan, FOH mix engineer Ian Shapcott, monitor mix engineer Ewan McDonald, replay systems operator Trevor Beck, patch/RF systems engineer Amy McDonald, chief comms systems engineer Kamal Adam Litak and chief systems techs Mohamad Shah Ridzal (Control systems) and Mohammad Nurhisham (field systems).
(Jim Evans)
