UK - "At first there wasn't going to be any grid, we were asked to rig a system off the king poles." Bryan Grant of audio contractor Britannia Row Productions describing the preliminaries of what is always a big event in the music industry calendar, the MTV Europe Awards (EMA's for short). Unrealistic as that might seem - this is after all Europe's premier music awards show (isn't it?), the initial belief that you could stage a world class event off some tent poles proved a partial blessing.
"The design was very different this year," continued Grant, "they brought in Mark Fisher [creative director was Ray Winkler] and he produced a quite minimalist set design, a big departure from previous years. Plus the show was characterized by multiple performance points, with many presentation areas as well."
The concept predicated a highly distributed system approach for both audio and lights within the confines of the De Boer eight-pole Galaxy tent (a sizable 107m by 60m). "So even when it was finally decided that Stageco would put in a ground-support grid we barely had to change the PA system design at all." From that perspective, king poles were a blessing; Fisher was hardly likely to produce a design that put a king pole in the middle of any of the stages was he? So positionally, speaker placement could remain unaltered.
"The other big difference was that the audience were everywhere," continued Grant. "This was an interesting space, effectively the sound and lighting's job was a conversion of a tent into a TV studio." Those who've seen the show will recall the huge catwalk from rear main stage left, and two bridges up over the satellite stages, creating a host of settings and camera angles.
But couldn't such a dispersed show harbour potential continuity disasters? "Maybe, but the show was extremely well rehearsed, the new director, Hamish Hamilton, brought a whole new aura of control to the event." Brit Row is an experienced contractor at the EMAs, but it's their eclectic stock of PA systems that enabled them to fulfil the needs of this novel design. "We used the smaller EV XLine C, L'Acoustics ARCs for fills around the satellites, and then EV1152s and Turbo 440s to provide low-level fill around the various stages."
In all, 14 sound zones, with Grant himself providing the system design: "The complexity of such zoning is obvious; you might need to dial out just one element of an Xline to enable a presenter to speak in front of its field, but keep the rest of the system active so the audience can hear. Leon Dawson who programmed the EV Iris system for us was an important cog in the Brit Row team."
Iris gives control to single amps, and thus - if you can afford enough amps - total control of every box. Add to this level of live audio finesse the familiar details of Derrick Zieba providing the broadcast interface - control coming from a pair of Yamaha PM1Ds ("the de facto standard for these kind of complex events," said Zieba) and it's easy to see why production manager Dominic Peissel (from Blackout, of whom more later) and MTV linchpin Sofi Huda were so content and calm.
"We did look at using the DiGiCo D5 this year," said Zeiba, "and personally in terms of operation I prefer it. But . . . most of the band's engineers preferred to go with the Yamaha - most were much more familiar with it, and that's an important consideration in a pressure situation like this."
Once again, Al Gurdon provided the lighting design, Richard Gorrod at VLPS very much the linchpin for logistics and fit-up, with support from Mick Healey back in Greenford. "Al starts with a very general design," explained Gorrod, "it's not a huge budget and the venue presented some challenges, obviously. Grid height put lights at 11.2 meters, just 10 meters clear of the main stage; for this type of event that's very low, so we were scrabbling for wide-angle lamps."
By happy coincidence, 32 VL2Cs (the elder statesman of modern mov
