The Senior Skills Council for Science, Engineering & Manufacturing Technologies (SEMTA) is a not-for-profit organization specializing in engineering training in the UK, and this prestigious annual Awards event recognizes excellence within their various nationwide apprenticeship schemes.
CPL worked for the third consecutive year alongside Redditch based production company Eclipse Communications. The production design was a collaboration by Lee Gruszeckyj from CPL and Dave Bowring from Eclipse. This year's host was business journalist and BBC Breakfast co-presenter Steph McGovern.
"It was great to pool forces and work together with Eclipse," commented Lee.
Dave Bowring had been involved for several months prior to the Awards in producing VT material from interviews and from shadowing all the candidates which were presented to the judging panel to assist the process. Edited versions of these video clips were also shown on the night, and the VT footage essentially set the tone of the event design.
In addition to this, several other bespoke pieces of content were produced including awards stings, sponsor footage, custom ambient content and a range of other video materials.
All the video - stored on a series of MacBook Pros running PlaybackPro and Dell laptops running slides and sponsor logos - was front projected into two 14ft wide screens fed by 12K Panasonic laser projectors.
Live action feeds from two of CPL's operated Sony HXC-100 broadcast cameras were running into a Panasonic vision mixer and output to screen via a Barco PDS switcher which added an extra level of excitement and anticipation to the evening.
The lighting spec was designed to get good camera footage and to make the room look special for the occasion, with a majority LED rig chosen both to reduce both power consumption and heat emissions, an approach that worked extremely successfully.
The general ambient washes around the room were created with 8 x ARRI L5 fresnels, complimented by ETC ColorSource Spots for the profiles, plus a mixture of Clay Paky Sharpys and Martin MAC Aura moving lights, controlled via an Avolites Quartz desk with a playback wing, which also ran an LED star cloth backdrop with red, white and blue sections for some additional fun and pizzazz.
CPL designed a d&b audio system comprising flown Y8 line arrays left-and-right of the stage, with two V-SUBs a side under the stage and a centre cluster of four E12s flown on a separate truss (to the left and right arrays).
d&b's compact E6s were used for front-fill and foldback, while Q7 speakers made up the DJ system on the dancefloor for the after-party section of the event, with all sources run through a Yamaha QL1 console.
The microphone package included four tie-clips / belt packs and two hand-heads, all on DPA headsets.
(Jim Evans)
