Scharff Weisberg helped the Eos Orchestra turn the room inside out for their recent fundraising event at Capitale. The company provided a video and lighting package that was used to help patrons experience the orchestra from the conductor’s and musicians’ points of view.
"This is a very important event, where we raise up to a quarter of our annual funding," commented Eos Orchestra’s Curtis Dunn. "This year, the title and theme was ‘Sound Surround,’ a reversal of the phrase ‘surround sound,’ where we tried to show our patrons the perspective of being in the orchestra."
Rather than a traditional seating arrangement with the audience seated behind the conductor facing the orchestra, the audience was seated within each section of the orchestra so that they could see what the musicians see. Simultaneously, two Imag cameras captured the orchestra from the conductor’s perspective and displayed his POV on screens set up at either end of the hall.
An auction followed the performance and was supported by video clips and stills. For the dinner portion of the event, patrons listened to a jazz band and viewed Imag video clips of the orchestra’s past nine seasons, and a PowerPoint retrospective of the press they have received over the years.
"We were asked to transform an otherwise grand space into an intimate event," comments Christien Methot of design one, who designed the lighting. "To do this, we went about toning down the color in the surrounding space, used saturated colors in the ceiling and did everything in our power to focus the energy of the room into the center where the orchestra was playing. It was very effective, and as usual, Scharff Weisberg came through with flying colors. Everything went off without a hitch."
The video projection system supplied by Scharff Weisberg consisted of two Barco R10 10,000 lumen primary video projectors and two Barco R6 video projectors shooting on two 15’x 20’ Stumpl screens. Sources included a laptop computer, DVCam playback and live camera switched through a Panasonic MX-50 and two Folsom Screen Pro switchers assigning imagery to each screen. A Midas Heritage 1000 mixing console, microphones, signal processing and equalization components feeding the venue's sound system supported the jazz ensemble. The lighting system consisted of six VL3000s™, eight MAC 2000 washes as well as 12 Color Kinetics color blasts.
"Scharff Weisberg has always been great," concluds Eos’s Dunn. "With our tenth anniversary season approaching, we have made the commitment to incorporate a lot more multimedia into our performances and plan to use them to meet all of our AV and lighting needs for the coming year."