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NOTTING HILL CARNIVAL Following the cancellation of this year’s event, Notting Hill Carnival organisers enlist 80six to provide production and a state-of-the-art xR stage for a reimagined version of the annual festivities. 80six Director, Jack James speaks to TPi about the project...
One of the highlights of London’s summer events calendar, Notting Hill Carnival is a chance to showcase and celebrate the diversity of the country’s capital, attracting millions of people each year throughout the August bank holiday. Despite the inevitable cancelation of this year’s event, organisers still wanted to give loyal antendees a chance to enjoy the festivities with a streamed digital-only event. Key to the project was an elaborate xR video stage that was used throughout the weekend. Steve Jelley, MD of Dimension Studio – producers of this digital version of Carnival – approached Jack James of 80six to provide all the technical crew and hardware required to broadcast three days of content from Malcolm Ryan Studios in South London. A week after the show, James spoke to TPi about his experience on the project. “The creative brief was to create a virtual set to be reminiscent of Notting Hill street without it being so realistic that people would decide to attempt to go looking for the location of the broadcast,” explained James. Throughout the show, the main xR stage displayed the ‘London street’ with a full camera tracking system along with another green screen stage for other performances. There was also a roaming camera to capture footage
of the cooks who had set up in the car park to showcase cuisines from across the globe. One of the biggest challenges presented to the 80six team was the sheer amount of content that was to be streamed during the show. “There were two streams that were broadcast over three days for up to 15 hours a day, showcasing content from around the world delivered from the xR studio in London,” James explained. “A cause for a concern was the tracking system and the high likelihood of it losing calibration. However, the Stype RedSpy system proved to be rock solid throughout the two days of install and three days of live show, meaning we never needed to revert to the static backup camera.” For the LED screen, 80six deployed ROE Visual Diamond 2.6mm for the rear wall and Black Marble 4.6mm for the floor. “We chose the ROE DM2 and BM4 due to their exceptional performance on camera,” said James. “This was reinforced by a fully redundant Brompton SX40 processing system to ensure there were no issues with the signal being sent to the LED.” A pair of disguise gx2c media servers running Notch provided the backbone of the project. To capture the content live, 80six utilised Blackmagic Design URSA broadcast cameras, with the Video Director, Glenn 22
