E\T\C UK supplied 360-degree video projection using the OnlyView control system for the recent Travel Weekly Globe Awards.
The event was staged at Grosvenor House, London for Reed Business Information (RBI). The Globes cover all areas of the travel market and are regarded as the most prestigious accolades in the industry, providing an opportunity for travel agents to recognize suppliers that go the extra mile with services or products.
E\T\C UK’s Andy Joyes worked closely with RBI’s event producer Tom Perkins to create the show. This year Reed wanted to add a real “wow” factor to the presentation, and Perkins came forward with the idea of a circular projection screen that tied in nicely with the Globe theme.
E\T\C UK’s projection package consisted of four Barco R18 machines and the OnlyView control system to manage this element of the show. They were projecting on to a nearly 20 ft. diameter by 6.5 ft. high circular screen, suspended above an in-the-round stage in Grosvenor House’s Great Room.
The front-end elements of the show including all the VT play-ins, graphics, and award nominations (all stored on a hard drive) and the I-Mag mix coming from four video cameras supplied by Stage Right.
Backgrounds, sponsor logos, and general branding messages for the night were all programmed by Philip Pieridis using OnlyView, which was also used to process all of the other various video feeds, as well as the picture-in-picture control infrastructure onscreen from which the show was built.
The Barcos were positioned on the balcony at the four corners of the room. The circle of the projection screen was divided into four individual “screens” each facing diagonally into the room.
This is where OnlyView comes into its own, enabling projection to be achieved in the round by stitching and soft-edging the four screens seamlessly together and allowing content to be tracked around the whole surface. The windows appearing within the screens were mapped to the curve of the screen and the images pre-distorted, so the projection “cone” and all the content playing on it fitted the screen curvature perfectly.
The flexibility is due to the content for the backgrounds being contained and designed within OnlyView—fulfilling the dual roles of creating the show and being the playback system.
On top of the backgrounds, the content from Stage Right’s system was run into the OnlyView inputs (VT, graphics, awards nominations, etc). Andy Joyes explains, “It’s a great way of amalgamating the two systems—the tried-and-tested self-contained awards package produced by Tom Perkins, the backgrounds, and the generic event branding created in OnlyView, with OnlyView managing the whole show on screen.
Perkins comments,“Although central stages have been used in the Great Room before, this was the first time that sponsors saw their logos traveling 360 degrees above the stage, and the creative impact was very impressive.”