Made in Hull was designed to thrill, excite and intrigue the public and was created by the core creative team of Sean McAllister, Ala, Lloyd, Rupert Creed, Durham Marenghi, Dan Jones and producer Niccy Hallifax, working alongside numerous artists. The installations ran for seven days from 1-7 January.
tube - based in Manchester and London and known for its penchant for invention and thinking 'out-of-the-box' was working closely with BAFTA and Ivor Novello Award winning sound designer and composer Dan Jones who created content and curated each of the installations.
tube was chosen to undertake the work by Ground Control, Made in Hull's technical suppliers who were in turn appointed by Chris Clay, Technical & Operations Director at Hull UK City of Culture 2017.
Melvyn Coote, who founded the company 15 years ago, explained, "It was a fantastic project and a great honour to be asked to work with someone of Dan calibre. We all learnt a huge amount from the experience, and there were several firsts for us - including having to specify and tune a system that was acceptable to penguins and sharks!"
Melvyn is referring to one of the installations located just over the water from Hull's famous aquarium and marine centre, The Deep. The piece was composed by Terry Dunn but tube and the team needed to take into account the resident penguins and sharks in particular are known for their ultra-sensitive hearing!
Melvyn worked with a crew of 12 sound engineers - seven for the week-long run of shows and five more for the get-in which commenced 27 December and for the out on 9 January. All were hand-picked and are audio specialists in their own right.
Made in Hull attracted massive crowds - over 342,000 people over seven days - giving a great start to a year that will be full of vibrant transformational cultural activities celebrating the character of the city, its people, community, history and geography.
The biggest Made in Hull site was Queen Victoria Square in the historic heart of the city. The audience was surrounded by three different PA systems rigged on the three major buildings around the Square - Hull City Hall, Ferens Art Gallery and the Maritime Museum. A left and right speaker array was flown either side of each building on 9m high masts, each comprising four d&b V8s and a V-SUB per position. Central to each building were two B2s and two Y7Ps for fill.
In the surrounding streets leading to the square, three 'distance' PAs - each made up from a ground-stack of four Y8s and 1 Y-Sub - were located and fed with 'distance' effects to add to the enveloping complexity of the sound scape.
The site was dissected by a major road which made the logistics of elements like cable management that bit more challenging.
All the PA structures and various infrastructure like cable bridges and picks were supplied by Star Events, and the area was also architecturally lit and was supplied by dbn Lighting, also from Manchester.
Each aspect of these PAs was individually controlled so sound could be shifted around and spot effects applied via a Yamaha CL5 console run in unison with a Yamaha Rio 3224 rack to handle additional outputs.
Amplification was eight d&b D80s for the V arrays with five D12s driving the distance PAs.
Apple MAC Minis running QLab's multitrack audio were used for all the playback, chosen as a "reliable and flexible option" says Melvyn, as there was an amount of re-mixing, editing and finessing the content with Dan once everything was up-and-running on site.
Video content was designed by Hungarian animation director and video designer Zsolt Balogh and the projection kit was delivered by Bluman Associates.
Zebedee's Yard was the location of a pop-up football experience '105+dB' where tube set up four PA arrays, one in each corner of the yard consisting of two Y7Ps and two Y-SUBs on ground mounted poles, with another four Y10P fills and four Y-SUBS per side - each of the 12 points of sound were individually addressable and powered by D12 amps.
(Jim Evans)
