The event took place over three days and across five venues in the city, with Summit working in two locations - the Industrial Trade Fair Palace - a beautiful art nouveau exhibition centre dating from 1891, and the more contemporary Hilton Congress Centre. It was Summit's first event for Jigzaw; production manager Chris Venn asked them onboard after working with Summit on the 'Music on Fire' classical spectacular event at Sandhurst Military Academy in summer 2004.
At the Hilton Congress Centre, Summit's task was relatively straightforward. The Centre was divided into three sections, and the team installed over 100m of barrel, ladder beam, trussing, tab track and associated rigging to facilitate the hanging of lighting and sound kit in exactly the right places. The tricky element here was keeping within the loading limits of the venue hanging bars. This was done using truss, and scaffold spreaders where needed.
The Industrial Trade Fair Palace was a different matter entirely: this was also the site of the main Gala Awards and dinner on the Friday night a key event of the entire Meeting. This historic glass and steel construction building offers only six rigging points, all of them down the centre line of its main 1,700sq.m hall. Summit had to support three video screens, a 64m wide backdrop plus lighting and sound gear for the stage, which was butted up against one side of the venue - and well away from the centre line. To achieve this, Summit's Jon Bray designed a trussing grid using two sizes of Thomas Supertruss. The grid was both flown and ground-supported, using the Hall's six points to fly an elegant 65m 'spine' of truss that was connected to the grid above the stage area. This utilised six standard hoists for the flown truss and two double-speed hoists on the ground support (as they are double reeved over the masts), The grid was supported by two 10 metre ground support legs. The grid size was carefully designed so these were positioned into the higher areas of the backstage roof. A lower level of truss was added, clamped to the tower legs, supporting the screens and backdrop. Designing this truss support system to maximize the available height was crucial to the project's success. The completed, installed grid had to fit exactly into the higher reaches of the Palace's roof, entailing the towers being erected very close to the glass walls, a task requiring extreme diligence.
(Lee Baldock)
