Voice in a Million 2019

Overview

This spectacular children’s choir concert is held each year at the Wembley Arena. This is our third year of being the official production partners and Voice in a Million’s ten year anniversary, meaning that anticipation and expectations were very high.

Brief:

The brief required us to provide full production for the main stage, and we employed an immersive lighting design to illuminate the choirs, located throughout the tiered audience seating. The lighting design needed to be precise for TV and for the live production DVD, which contained footage of the event.

The choirs located in the tiered audience seating needed to be visually connected to the stage, ensuring that they remained part of the show during the entire performance.

The show was set up and built within six hours, meaning that an incredibly tight schedule had to be adhered to in order to be ready for choirs to arrive at the area by midday on the event date.

Solution:

Our in-house creative team developed a unique, visually appealing lighting design on a huge scale. Our aim was to enchant and captivate those in attendance, while never taking focus from the choirs located in the audience, who were illuminated with the combined use of beams, washes and molefays. With a total of 200m of truss and 60 points of rigging throughout the venue, and a large X truss structure flown above the stage, the stage design was impressive in both intricacy and scale.

Our camera package included a portable production unit which was utilised for filming the show. Multiple Sony HSC cameras, paired with lenses, were located at front of house, while smaller cameras on dollies were used in the pit, on stage and in fixed positions in the venue. A challenge faced in past events was achieving ample front light for the stage camera. This year, the use of a front truss of Robe Spiiders and SGM Q7s acting as a floor light worked brilliantly for recording purposes.

To connect the audience with the stage, two LED screens were flown either side of the stage, accompanied by a central screen. Controlled by our Barco S3, each board could be manipulated both independently and as part of a group, allowing truly creative use of the screens in question.

The sound system design operated on the principle of being ‘heard not seen’; allowing line array hangs to be flown close to the mother grid – out of sight while amplifying vocals sufficiently to fill the area, showcasing the excellent performances of the various choirs. The front of house featured an Avid Profile, with the use of PM5D monitoring and additional control from the Digico SD9. The audience choir mics were mixed independently from the stage, with all elements multitrack recorded for postproduction.

Project Deliverance:

Via the use of our three-phase process, develop, design and deliver, DMX produced an extravagant production for Voice in a Million 2019, with discussions already underway for 2020.