Together, Celebrating At The Park

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How does one transform a 25-acre park into a new and impressive, technologically sophisticated show site suitable for accommodation of 14,000 people, and all in just one week?

“Together” was the largest corporate event held in Israel in 2010. Bank Hapoalim, the largest bank in Israel, invited 14,000 of its employees to celebrate 90 years of banking, in 120 minutes of stage virtuosity.

If one gathers the workers of the largest bank in Israel, in the largest park in Israel, one must come up with the most impressive production. The unique show was divided into two main shows. The first was a stage show dealing with past, present, and future subjects, combining top artists: hundreds of musicians, singers, dancers, and actors. Under the “Together” title were combined varying substances and duets in an ongoing integration of old and new. The second part of the event was a concert by the leading and most appreciated song artist in Israel.

The key to success of this event was time and timing. Preparation time at the park was limited and required careful meticulous technical planning, involving the building of a 1,500sq-ft. stage, 14,000 seats, thousands of light sources, PA systems, pyrotechnics, and a 45’-high lighting rig, partly dynamic and required to move during the show.

The stage was meticulously designed to enable a quick shift between the musicians and the two different parts of the show. In 30 seconds, the back LED wall rose up, and the players’ stage was divided in two and pushed behind the side LED walls. In the following minute, a 55’-wide stage entered, the back wall returned to its original position, and the players took their seats for the second show to begin.

Timing of this show was crucial. How would the production synchronize the front-of-house team and the back-stage team with realtime lineup? This is a well known live shows problem that Jiminy Creative challenged together with the AVS team. Jiminy started developing a preliminary beta version for the “Stage Timeup.” Timeup is a software, presenting real dynamic lineup including: general show times, specific item countdown, ready and standby announcements, and, of course, a realtime clock synchronized with real show time. This enables realtime planning, predicting time deviations and limitations (for example: noise limitation in an outdoor show after a certain hour), and obviously, CCTV display.

The program’s interface is presented on LCD screens. The show manager enables control of the lineup, changing and updating it, while hundreds of participants are updated in realtime. Timeup is based on extracting time data from the various consoles. In this show, Timeup used data from Dataton Watchout and Medialon systems.

Jiminy enabled impressive accuracy in motion between tens of participants on stage and backstage while synchronizing the lighting, pyrotechnics, amplification, and visual media teams. At the end of this positive trial, Jiminy decided to further develop Timeup into a more dynamic and intelligent program, to support tablet and smartphone devices.


Creative Team
Ofir Zilber, Dotan Miara (Kenes Events, Kenes Group International),
Project Production
Ron Carmi (Jiminy Creative), Creative Manager and Director
Kobi Hoffmann (Jiminy Creative), Visual Director/Producer
Shira Barashi, Artistic Producer
AVS (Israel)/LEDIM (Design Group), Visual Technologies
Asaf Shem-Tov, Visual—Technical Director
Zohar Levi (AVS), Visual and “Timeup” Programmer
Ronen Najar, Lighting Designer and Programmer
Insight Studio, Locomotion Studio, and Jiminy Creative, Visual Content
Betty-Bam Lights and Sound, Lighting and Sound
Erez Yaniv, Stage Designer
Stage Design Group (Evyatar Banayan), Stage, Rigging, Construction, Fabrication, and Motion control
Vicky Zigdon (Lavi-Omega), Pyrotechnics Design


Equipment
11 Sinolight P11 LED Modules
418 Gluxtech BAtn LED Modules
2 Barco FLM R20+
4 Samsung 50" LCD Screens
2 Kramer VP747 Matrix
5 Dataton Watchout Displays
2 Medialon Show Control V5
20 Space Canon Xenon
32 Clay Paky 1500
64 Martin Professional MAC 2000
80 D.light PAR LED 64
30 ETC Source Four Ellipsoidal 19°
12 Martin Professional Atomic Strobe
250 250W Quartz Lamps
10 8-lite Blinder
16 Haze Machine
10 Smoke Machine
2 4kW Followspot
2 MA Lighting grandMA Light
iBEX Motion Control System
“Stage Timeup” Running Show Software