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SPECIAL OLYMPICS WORLD GAMES

TECHNICAL SUPPLIERS FROM FROM ALL CORNERS OF THE REGION UNITE TO BRING THE ANNUAL MULTIDISCIPLINARY COMPETITION TO ABU DHABI FOR THE FIRST TIME. TPMEA TAKES A CLOSER LOOK AT THE PRODUCTION VALUES OF THE SPECIAL OLYMPICS’ OPENING AND CLOSING CEREMONIES.

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For over 50 years, the Special Olympics organisation has worked tirelessly to provide year-round sports training and competing to men and women with intellectual disabilities giving them continuing opportunities.

However, the annual competition has come a long way since its early roots back on a Soldier Field in Chicago, Illinois back in 1968 and is now a global spectacle. It is now cited as one of the world’s largest humanitarian sporting event and a global movement, which focuses on the empowerment of People of Determination with intellectual disabilities through the power of sport.

This year, following a bidding campaign led by The Crown Prince Court, saw Abu Dhabi

successfully be awarded the hosting medal. The Crown Prince Court led the winning bid efforts with a mission to promote positive social change for people with intellectual disabilities and create a more inclusive society. The Crown Prince Court’s bid was very much in line with its mission to promote positive social change for people with intellectual disabilities within the region. In fact, last year H. H. Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed declared 2019 as the Year of Tolerance, with the hope to be a bridge of communication between people of different cultures in a respectful environment that rejects extremism and emphasises on the acceptance of the other.

For both the opening and closing ceremonies, the organisers made a temporary

home in the city’s Zayed Sports City Stadium. During the opening and closing ceremonys, all 7,500 athletes from 190 nations were treaded to two lavish opening ceremonies with celebrities from around the world came to give the audience and athletes a show they would never forget with performances from the Global Unified Choir, DJ Paul Oakenfold, Avril Lavigne and Luis Fonsi to name a few.

LIGHTING & RIGGING Commissioned by People, illuminating the proceedings was eclipse who provided an impressive array of fixtures throughout the venue for both events. eclipse Staging Services’ Project Manager, Duncan Shortt spoke about

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the various challenges that arose in the project: “In terms of challenges, beyond the duration of the build running up to the opening ceremony, there was a major overhaul and redesign of the stage and scenic elements prior to the closing ceremony.

Collectively, this involved 24-hour work across all departments of the event to facilitate the change around, and allow for the technical creative team to then reprogram and choreograph a spectacle fit to be televised on the world stage.”

Designed by dbnAudile’s Lead Lighting Designer, Stephen Page, the lighting rig for the event consisted of an impressive array of over 800 lighting fixtures. From the Claypaky range, there were around 60 Scenius Unicos, 100 Mythos 2, as well as Sharpys and Super Sharpys. There were also Spots, Profiles and Washes from the Alpha 1500 stable.

Robe brought a further 80 BMFL Blades and 50 Robin 150 LED Beams with Vari-Lite, Martin

by Harman and SGM bringing a further 100 VL3500 Wash FX, MAC Auras and P5 LED Floods respectively, all controlled from a network of 5 MA Lighting grandMA2 consoles.

The lighting team comprised around 10 technicians, on night and day rotation covering about 18 hours a day on site to maintain and manage the continuous functionality of the lighting rig in quite testing atmospheric conditions over a six-week period to see things through to the end of the closing ceremony.

For rigging, eclipse’s offerings included the provision and installation of the rigging infrastructure for all the lighting, audio and video components. In total it supplied over 120 motors and 500m as well as deploying high-speed winches to move LED panels while the main LED screen was built to a height of approximately 20m. “Health and safety was of utmost importance,” remarked Duncan. “Ensuring that the event achieves the highest HSE standards, People drafted in the support of Gallowglass

to manage the Stadium side work, and Flash Entertainment ran the overall Special Olympics site infrastructure, including a separate set of HSE inductions.”

Duncan gave his final thoughts on the event. He commented: “The Special Olympics has been touted as the single biggest event the UAE has ever hosted, and so to play such a major supporting role in the opening and closing ceremonies is a great privilege and a very rewarding experience. Our crew worked day and night to keep everything at the highest possible level of production.”

VIDEO Creative Technology (CT) worked alongside client People to deliver all live video aspects of both the opening and closing ceremony for this prestigious and heart-warming event.

CT supplied a 600sqm upstage screen, a total of 270sqm relay screens, 580sqm LED Floor, 90sqm tracking screen, and 2500sqm of mapped

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floor projection using RZ31k Panasonic Laser projectors.

The impressively large 600sqm LED screen was placed directly opposite the VIP box where the Crown Prince and heads of state sat, and the relay screens were strategically positioned around the arena to ensure all attendees didn’t miss a thing. The floor LED was integrated into the main stage construction, creating a 6m wide ‘doughnut’ display area some 32m in diameter, which was then covered with a white projection material diffuser.

Dan Hughes, CT’s Senior Project Manager, explained: “There was a central circular stage, and outer ring stage which we projected onto and an inner ring of 8mm LED joined the two surfaces. We used a white diffusion on the LED to open up the viewing angle of the screen fully. The white diffusion also served to turn the LED screen into a matching white surface, so it appeared as one full

area instead of a black/negative ring in-between two white stages.”

A key feature of the opening ceremony production was a 10m diameter flying disc, weighing nearly 5 tonnes, the disc incorporated lighting, pyro and, impressively, a 9m diameter LED screen. The disc rose up 30m from the stage at the start of the show and tracked back over the main LED screen, relaying show content throughout to enhance the floor projections. At the climax of the ceremony, the two torch bearing athletes travelled on board the disc as it flew back to its centre stage position.

Tom Stocks, CT’s Senior Video Engineer, went on to say: “For the LED we utilised our new HDMI 2.0 and 12G SDI kit to maintain a fully redundant 4k at 60 4:4:4 uncompressed workflow from the media server to screen. In the field, we had a remote Screen Management system comprised of linked Barco E2 and S3s managing all LED

scaling and mapping.” All Projection, LED control and Image Processing was integrated on a centralised fully redundant network ring controlled from FOH and utilised CT’s new 1G and 10G fibre networking solutions.

Stocks stated: “Our 288 x 288 Crosspoint matrix took on all the main feeds and distributed them across the site, and our new Lightware 2.0 matrix managed backup feeds.” CT also provided a selection of disguise media servers with two pairs of 4x4pro (main and understudy) running HDMI 2.0 VFC cards and 3G VFC cards respectively with a further main and understudy 2x2 running production.”

Hughes gave his final thoughts from the project: “Both the opening and closing ceremonies were amazing. Our client, People, did a fantastic job bringing this production to life. We want to congratulate all the athletes that have

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participated in the games over the last week. It has been inspirational to watch and a pleasure to have been part of such an uplifting event.” Mark Fogwill, Technical Director at People also commented: “I would like to thank CT for their support on this very successful project. The screens, projection and content management were a massive part of the ceremonies, and we are all very pleased with the way they managed this with their team. The feedback from all involved has been 100% positive, and the live broadcast looked fantastic. We are enormously grateful to you for your support, and we look forward to working closely with you again.”

SOUND Throughout the seven-day event of sporting events, Delta Sound was responsible for two main components. The first was being commissioned by People to provide full audio support PA networking and control as well as timecode distribution for both the opening and closing ceremonies. The second was to provide

the audio overlay package for sporting events specialists Great Big Events.

For the both opening and closing, Delta supplied an L-Acoustics K1 over K2 systems in a general left right hand with outfills all flown from the stadium roof. Commenting on the company’s involvements with the event was Delta’s Director of Projects, Al Woods. “We used Kara delays flown above the VIP from the stadium roof and ground stacked K2 delays to cover masking of audio from flown screens along with subs and rear fills either side of the stage with SB28s and K2s respectively.”

Delta coordinated the full sound design package and utilised its DiGiCo stock of SD7s and FOH and a SD11 at playback as well as an SD5 at monitors.

With only a few suggestion event organisers were happy for Delta to take the lead of the sound design for the event. Mean while away from the stadium, Delta’s overlay component of the project was spread across 28 venues with an army in excess of 40 engineers and technicians

working around the clock to prep, build, manage and de-rig in the venues throughout Abu Dhabi. Delta Sound is now part of the Production Resource Group LLC.

Following the week of competition in a selection of sports from athletics, badminton, swimming and tennis, the event came to a close with all athletes once again collecting under the metaphoric roof of the Zayed Sports City Stadium and entertained by Nicole Scherzinger and Keala Settle ended it with a dramatic performance of This is Me from The Greatest Showman. Surely a fitting end to an event that celebrates diversity within the global community. Photos: Special Olympics World Games Abu Dhabi 2019, Creative Technology and Delta Sound (now part of the PRG) www.specialolympics.org www.abudhabi2019.org www.people-creative.com www.ct-group.com www.eclipse.ae www.dbnaudile.co.uk

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