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No one does anything by halves in Dubai…as Louise Stickland discovered when she visited the middle east in november to observe the production of the Dubai international finance centre's hugely impressive inauguration event.
(Source: totalproduction 2/2006)
Constantly buzzing and expanding beyond belief, Dubai encapsulates an pioneering spirit of adventure. Whether it’s architecture, leisure, entertainment or business, this city embraces everything with an intense, full throttle enthusiasm. It sizzles with opportunities and possibilities, a positive ‘can-do’ mentality, a gilded hinterland of material and economic dreams. Whether its building an undersea hotel, constructing the world’s tallest skyscraper or building a real snowdome in the desert... everything is absolutely possible in free- spirited Dubai.
This gung-ho attitude has fused almost seamlessly into the shows happening in and around the Emirates. Nothing is too much of a technical challenge, nothing is insurmountable, a fact surely reflected in some of the most ambitious world-class events being staged there.
With November bang the middle of the Middle East event season, it seems that the UAE-based production industry is mirroring its incredible current buoyancy in other territories. Top technicians, programmers and designers are being scrambled from across the world to work on their frenetic show schedule.
One of the things I like best about Dubai - apart from the incredibly low crime rate which, sadly, takes some getting used to - is that events always draw together a lively international production team. The inauguration event for the Dubai International Finance Centre (DIFC) was no exception. It effervesced with an eclectic mix of accents, languages and cultures, both local and global, all pitching in together to pull off an exceptionally demanding show.
At the hub of the event was producer Katie Viera, executive director of production company HQ Creative, and Jo Marshall, head of production, who pitched and won the contract to produce the event amidst stiff competition. HQ Creative’s innovative ideas involved using DIFC’s imposing ‘The Gate’ building (a large brand new square-like construction resembling Paris’s Grande Arch de La Defense) as a natural physical backdrop to the event.
HQ’s brief from DIFC was specific in some ways. The ideas they pitched involved staging a sophisticated, International show that looked to the future. They won the contract about three months ahead of the event, which is a long lead time for Middle East events.
The Show
The evening kicked off with a speech by Dr Omar Bin Sulaiman, Head of DIFC, followed by the official inauguration of the building by Dubai’s Crown Prince, His Highness Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al Maktoum, who is also Minister of Defence and President of DIFC. The whole concept of DIFC has very much been part of the Sheikh’s future vision for Dubai.
This was followed by a lively 20 minute son et lumiere featuring lighting, lasers, large format and video Projection, pyrotechnics, kinetic painting, and both live and pre-recorded music - with a storyboard highlighting Dubai’s history, present and future. A short intermission was followed by an hour long performance from legendary tenor Andrea Bocelli, accompanied by the 78-piece Prague Symphony Orchestra.
The show was to be staged for the Sheikh and 1,500 special guests and VVIPs. Viera knew from the outset that it needed to be imaginative, fast moving and stimulating as the Sheikh sees no shortage of world class performances. She also wanted it to have meaning and a strong element of culture and identity, rather than just a heady display of technological cleverness.
HQ Creative has been working in Dubai for nearly 10 years, and has plenty of experience in staging large spectaculars in the territory. The company’s special events division has really expanded in the last two Years, and Jo Marshall joined the team 14 months ago, to work specifically on production in this area. ”Assembling the right team” is the core element to make a high profile event like this work on site, said MarshalI. Adding that the attention to detail is intense, and no presentational detail goes unscrutinized.
They selected leading German rental operation Neumann & Müller to supply the vast majority of the lighting, sound and AV kit, which was flown in by DC I 0 jumbo. It relived much of the pressure knowing that such a large proportion of the kit was coming from a single source. It was the first time HQ had worked with them, and it proved a wholly positive experience, emphasised Marshall.
The Neumann & Müller team was led by two charismatic Englishmen - Bill Pugh (from the Munich office) and Stuttgart-based Dex Smith. Both have interesting musical backgrounds; they ended up settling in Germany and now project manage for Neumann & Müller. Each very different in character, they’re a great double-act.
Picture: The crew...Top Row: from left: Nick Jevons; Andy Jackson (Head of Audio, Gearhouse Dubai); Video Director Nick Rae; Lunatex's Frank Lohse and Felix Preibe. Bottom Row: Riggers Boris Hölscher and Richard Estridge; Dex Smith; Bill Pugh; Jo Marshall (HQ Creative's Head of Production) and Nick Chapmann (Redeye Events' Site & Production Manager).
The main challenge was undoubtedly the rigging and the site specific nature of the event. They had a 74 metre high building with a large central arch in the middle that created the gap into which the stage and production area had to be fitted... and no flying or rigging points! Not that this deterred anyone. Because of the position in which the lighting truss needed to be to be hung and the fact that they needed a reasonable amount of space immediately above the stage for projections, flying the lighting truss was the only fully flexible option.
Richard Estridge came onboard to oversee this operation. He and Marshall worked closely during pre- production to come up with a solution, in consultation with local structural engineers, AI Shabab.
The result of much lateral thinking was seven 15 metre I-Beams that were craned on to the top of the building and placed in a cantilever position with seven metres protruding. They were cross braced to minimise lateral deflection and ballasted with 24 tonnes of water. The correct I-Beam weight needed to hang 1,5 tonnes per beam was established, and it then increased two sizes from that for safety margins.
CAD drawings were sent to DIFC’s engineers, Hyder Consulting, who also assessed how the additional weight would affect the building. They attached beam trolleys to all the I-Beams, and then in turn, seven pairs of one tonne Lodestar motors with 30 rnetre chains on to these. This way, the necessary rigging was run down rather than pulled up which made a lot more gravitational sense, and all the trusses were constructed on the ground.
A 12 x 10 metre trussing mother grid was hung underneath the beams, off 14 bridled points, and the 10 metre square lighting (or ‘logo’) box truss, compete with its three internal straight trusses, was sub-hung on another 15 points. The bottom comer of the raked logo truss ended up 21.5 metres off the ground, and the total weight loading on the beams when the truss was fully loaded, was 3.8 tonnes.
Estridge’s on-site team included N&M’s Boris Hölscher, plus locally based Shane Manning and John Paul Gladwin. “It took a bit of guts at first when we had to shin out on the beams,” admitted Estridge, adding that they had to do any of this type of work on the beams before the sun reached peak intensity at 2pm, after which they were too hot to handle until much later on in the day.
With typical rigger’s black humour, whilst we were at the top of the building. Estridge and Hölscher calculated that it would take approximately seven seconds to reach the ground should you plummet from the top of the building, depending on the adopted shape during descent!
GROUND CONTROL AND MAJOR TOM
Dubai production industry maverick Nick Chapman took on the role of site and production manager. He has lived there for same time and has been involved in all Creative’s major projects. The major issues here he emphasises, were effectively “playing” with someone else’s new building,and the politics and red tape involved in getting permission to do what was needed in, on and around the structure.
The site build logistics also had to be carefully calculated. Once the grandstand was erected, the main access was cut off and the same elements had to be fed into the equation for the get out.
Chapman has also looked after all the local elements of production which included the L-Acoustics V-DOSC front stacks supplied by Gearhouse Dubai and all the scaffolding structures - grandstand, FOH and delay towers, etc - that were built by AI Laith Scaffolding. The 17 metre wide revolve on which the orchestra sat was supplied by Stage Kinetics, also from Germany, and was capable of carrying high asymmetric loads (e.g. the full orchestra on one side and a lectem on the other).
Work on the site, towered over by the two elegant Emirates Towers skyscrapers, started three weeks before the show, and involved an average of 65 people on-site a day for the duration. At key times, there were many more.
The main PA arrays comprised 10 V-DOSC elements per side on ground towers, plus a centre hang of eight dV-DOSCs on the lower end of the lighting truss, purely for an effects position. There vvere three subs a side, more than enough for an orchestra. It was powered by Lab.gruppen LA48As, with XTA DP 226s for system management.
Gearhouse Dubai’s head of sound, Andy Jackson, undertook the system design and installation, and coordinated with Bocelli’s production crew and team Neumann & Müller. Bocelli’s sound company Major Tom, also added in their own elements of the audio rig including the DiGiCo D5 console used by FOH engineer Luciano Serena.
From left: Kai Kasprzyk and Ralf Lottig of Tarm Showlasers; Video Programmer Klaus Ostermayer; power guru Alan Dearie of Essential Show Products; Chris Marsh of Major Tom.
“It’s been excellent working with two other companies,” said Jackson, commenting on the synergy between Gearhouse Dubai, Major Tom and N&M, “Everyone is respected in their own rights and we’ve all really gelled and worked harmoniously together.” N&M’s Bill Pugh, the shows technical director, took up the sonic story. Neumann & Müller supplied a Yamaha DM2000 as the main FOH matrix desk to run a 5.1 speaker system, with a pair of d&b Q I stacks and B2 subs secreted at the back of house providing the rear left and rear right arrays. The 20 minute ‘corporate presentation’ audio was also run through the DM2000, plus two lectern mics, two hand-helds and all the video in and outs. Bocelli also ran their D5 into the DM2000 which then switched it to the live speaker positions. The DM2000 was run by Ekki Von Nordenskjold.
The final part of the son et lumiere - the ‘1812 Overture’ - which included two minutes of lasers and a minute of laser and pyro eye candy - was run from a playback track as it had to be timecode synched to all the effects going off. However with the orchestra already being onstage, it was decided to also have them playing live in the background. The son et lumiere music was chosen by Viera and kinetic artist Norman Perryman, who’s unique visual art Viera wanted to integrate into the show from day one.
Klaus Ostermayer, who coordinated all the video visuals, and Pugh travelled to Prague to make a digital recording the orchestra so all the departmental programmers would have something to work with. As Bocelli’s orchestra of choice, it also made sense to also use Prague Symphony for the first half of the show. The task of sourcing the music scores was time consuming recalls Pugh. In the end, most of it came from the Bavarian Radio Symphony’s library.
The Major Tom crew brought along Chris Marsh and Ali Viles, their D5 and associated outboards plus all the on-stage mics needed for Bocelli’s show. Each violin and viola featured had its own Schertler ‘bug’ mic, picked for their high-level-before-feedback ratio. For the larger string instruments - cellos and basses - they used a mix of Schertlers and the larger diaphragmed Neumann 103.
Layering on top of these were four ambient overheads (Schoeps MK4s with CMC6 pre-amps) per section of strings and two overheads per section for woodwind and brass. These overheads enabled Serena to boost the warmer, more traditional orchestral sound when needed. Feeds from the stage including vocals pushed the channel count up to 108, nearly filling the D5.
Left: Luciano Serena, Andrea Bocelli's FOH engineer.
Below: Hog operator Michael Baganz.
Artistic
Projection and AV was a vibrant collage of video and Pani large format, projected on to two horizontal screens above the stage. The lower of the two was made from plywood, measuring 26,9m wide by 7,06m deep, used for the widescreen format video projection, and the top was a truss-framed gauze measuring 25m x 6,92m, used primarily for both rear projected laser animations and front projected video.
The idea was to provide an AV show that took this visual medium to new levels in Dubai, and for which Viera wanted to combine a narrative storyboard with live kinetic painting and laser graphics.
They wanted a high-definition widescreen format for the best picture quality, and so chose a Watchout system to blend the images from six doubled up pairs of Panasonic PT-D 7700 video projector on to the bottom screen. The Watchout elements of the system and all programming was co-ordinated by Klaus Ostermayer.
The second screen (the gauze) was divided up into five fields and fed by three Highlight 12,000 Dsx projectors, with all nine video projectors running through the Watchout via its dedicated software. The finished image was 3850 pixels wide by 1050 high, which also needed plenty of high resolution source images. Viera created the show’s storyboard, and the images were then sourced from an assortment of image backs and archives - locally and intemationally - a process which took two months to amass, and get approved by the client.
The Pani large format slide projections were beamed on to the sides of the building making up the arch, each measuring 16m wide by 30m high in portrait format. They used a doubled up pair of Pani BP6s per side, located on the same towers as the rear left and light audio stacks, and were operated by Jo Schramm via a GrandMA Lite lighting console. The finished artwork involved 128 separate slides providing a total of 32 pictures.
The kinetic painting was blended into the projection picture via a Barco Encore system operated by Jorg Eibach. He also put I-Mag camera windows onto the screens at strategic points during the inauguration ceremony, and during Bocelli’s set. Entering Norman Perryman’s world is like morphing into a hallucinogenic, highly creative mix of quirky engineering and a radical painter/mad professor type. Actually, Perryman is incredibly grounded, an Amsterdam-based painter (www.normanperryman.com) working with great skill and passion in the wonderfully sensual world of kinetic painting. He believes he’s currently the only practicing kinetic painter in the world.
Left: Kinetic painter Norman Perryman in full artistic flow. Right: Visual control during the show.
Using five old-fashioned overhead projectors, approximately 50 brushes, 30 pots and 30 different plates for the show, and following the orchestral score, he painted live on-screen to the music, using light in it’s purest, most fluid and unadulterated form. It was a complete contrast to anything that could have been artificially produced by the cleverest random generation graphics rnachine with the fuzziest logic.
Perryman’s live art was beamed on to a projection screen in his lair, recorded via a Sony 1920 x I 080 pixel HD video camera and then red into the Encore system and output as a 12 metre insert on the main screen above stage. It added some real human magic to an incredibly tightly programmed and millisecond- accurate cued show. Combined with the real orchestra, it also emphasised the slightly edgy ‘liveness’, and an improvisational quality often lost on big, slick presentations.
JEVONS’ TOUCH
The show was recorded by Dubai TV for broadcast, in addition to the six-camera PPU also supplied by Neumann & Müller, and directed by Nick Rae. Well- known for his rock’n’roll designs, UK-based lighting designer Nick Jevons was asked to put forward a design by Bill Pugh - the two had previously worked on corporate events for Swatch and Nokia, where Jevons had also lit a building and a stage.
During a site visit in August, in a moment of sheer inspiration, Jevons grabbed one of DIFC’s coasters, rotated it 45° and declared that the truss design had come to him, based on the DIFC logo! “It was pure Spinal Tap!,” he recalled.
With a trim height of 25 metres from the front end of the logo truss, he chose Martin MAC 2000 Wash fixtures, picked for their brightness. Avoiding getting lighting flare on the screen made the focus tricky. The logo truss consisted of 28 MAC 2000s ( 14 Washes and 14 Spots), 16 High End Studio Beams, seven 5kW fresnels and 16 2kW fresnels, 12 2kW profile spots, 18 six-lamp bars and 14 JTE PixelPARs for toners.
The building was lit with 16 Space Cannons, plus 20 SGM Palcos lighting the top section and 36 Clay Paky CP400 Wash Lights illuminating the windows of the top floor. There were also four Novalite High Ground beam spotlights blasting up on to the structure from the back of the grandstand.
The other challenge was to light Sheikh Mohammed for the cameras during the brief inauguration ceremony - without getting any lights in his face - which he finds uncomfortable. This delicate balance was achieved working with a stand-in during rehearsals the night before.
The other major issue was keeping the stage looking intimate whilst revealing the vast expanse of the Gate’s full fascia. To imagine achieving this task in daylight was almost impossible. Only when darkness fell, and the show emerged for real could you appreciate the synergy between the visual elements that saw the stage, orchestra, lighting and projection carefully framed to produce this result.
Jevons enjoyed working in collaboration with the laser and pyro departments enormously. The logo truss/stage lighting was operated by Michael Baganz using a WholeHog II and the architecturals were operated by Carlos Gozon using an Avolites Pearl.
Each section of the five sections of the corporate show- based on chapters in the history and development of Dubai - was themed with different coloured lighting.
LASERS & PYRO
Tarm Showlasers supplied the lasers. The German-based company has an office in Dubai and works regularly in the Middle East. For DIFC, they supplied four 12 Watt full colour systems - two for the graphics and two for the beam effects. plus two green 5W DPSS lasers on the control tower for front projecting on to the building. All lasers were air cooled and worked off a standard 220 Volt supply.
Control was a PC-based DSP system operated by Kai Kasprzyk, who developed the content with the client and Katie Viera before spending about two weeks programming the system. There were certain specific elements that had to be incorporated, like the DIFC logo. Lasers ran for a total of eight minutes during the show, all of which was hand cued apart from the final two minutes laser and pyro finale which went to timecode.
It was interesting running lasers for a classical show, said Tarm’s Ralf Lottig. They had to look really elegant and very different from anything you might do for a rock show or a dance event! They also had a very tight timetable for a complex show, but this was all made possible he said, due to the “great organisation of the show”.
Pyro was by Lunatx from Dusseldorf, and they worked closely with Tarm on the finale minute of the corporate show, which was replete with pyro cues including approximately 900 effects on the fascia of the arch and I 00 effects off each of the buildings flanking The Gate.
The pyro on the fascia had to be stage-type pyro as it was very near to the audience and there was no room for a fall out zone, but the mines and comet effects on the sides shot up to over 100 metres. There was also pyro on the roof of The Gate, and the pyro moments came fast and furiously raining down to make an exhilarating finale to the piece. Control was via a customised Galaxysis PC-based system - a German brand from Bavaria.
The installation of effects around the fascia of the building was a galvanising experience entailing lots of abseiling, and dealing with winds. The pyro was attached to the fascia via 18 bespoke steel wire rope ‘ladders’, secured to the cleaning machine rail at the top, with the aluminium bases to each ladder ballasted by concrete weights at the bottom.
Site power was sorted by Alan Dearie of UK-based Essential Show Products, who worked with local company Byrne. They supplied three 650 KVA generator sets running in sync for all the necessary show power. He also dealt with all the other areas needing power like catering and hospitality, dressing rooms, the green room, rigging power and site wide lighting, etc. There was a separate 50 KVA gennie to run the rigging power and an independent 175 KVA to run the VIP hospitality area at the front of the arena.
Last but by no means least, the fabulous dedicated and hard-working team of production assistants need a big mention. They rarely saw the light of day and dealt with a mountain of “stuff”, including logistics, travel and accommodation arrangements, running the float, organising the runners, dealing with passes, catering numbers and numerous other unquantifiable issues... always smiling and never fazed!
Production services were supplied by Mushroom Productions, a collective of freelancers from South Africa, from which Candice Dalziel and Kim Akester came over to work on DIFC. They were joined by Nadine Manning from Dubai whose local knowledge was invaluable.
Shows like DIFC’s are ambitious in the extreme and take risks in terms of pushing technical boundaries. Not the largest show in the world in terms of audience numbers, but certainly one of the most challenging in terms of site, location, fulfilling the conceptual brief... and impressing the most influential people in the country.
TPi
Photography by Louise Stickland