WATCHOUT ENTERTAINS AT SA BANKERS’ CONFERENCE

There was nothing remotely standard about the stunning visuals at Standard Bank’s 2014 Corporate and Investment Banking conference, South Africa. At the key biennial event, the 1200 delegates were greeted by a seamless WATCHOUT show on a magnificent 360° scale playing out on fourteen 20K projectors. This challenging event was made possible by thorough planning, outstanding creative content and a finely-tuned event team.

Standard Bank approached production house O’MAGE to conceptualize, design and deliver their biennial Corporate and Investment Banking conference. The bank requested a central stage environment which opened up for many a creative concept. Peter Blond, lead creative director on the project, designed a seamless 360° screen surrounding the audience. The venue chosen to accommodate the 1200 delegates was the Super Bowl at Sun City in South Africa. As an added challenge, this one-day conference required a quick turnaround for the party that same evening.

The projection screen – probably the most anticipated part of the event – was a 170m by 8m Cyclo 200 projection surface, provided by Showtex. Six double doors were built into the screen which were used as access to the venue. While closed, the doors disappeared into the screen, allowing for some interesting entrances synchronized with graphical treatments in WATCHOUT. Projection specialists Marcel Wijnberger, Bradley Hilton and Grant Reyes ensured that the fourteen 20K Christie projectors in the WATCHOUT show lit the surface and looked absolutely stunning.

CI-Nation handled the technical aspects of the conference and brought MGG Productions on board for rigging, lighting, projection and audio. brought MGG Productions on board for rigging, lighting, projection and audio. Denzil Smith, senior project manager from MGG pulled in a crew second-to-none to assist with this challenging event. Content creation on a screen of this magnitude is crucial and thorough planning was necessary. Peter Blond provided well thought-out storyboards for each of the unique business units, allowing the team of four dedicated 3D animators to achieve the astonoshing results.

Mike Fynn from CI-Nation was then tasked with compositing all the graphic elements for the production and Dataton WATCHOUT was his playback system of choice.

"I’ve used WATCHOUT on numerous large-scale events around the world and chose it again for this conference due to its manipulation capabilities, capture possibilities and reliability. With just over 6TB of animations, it took three solid weeks of programming all the content," says Fynn.

Prior to the event, the complete system was installed and tested off-site on 65" full HD monitors. "This proved very useful to realize and optimize certain graphical animations as well as to test the hardware of the playback platform," notes Fynn.

Dataton Premium Partner PENMAC supplied CI-Nation with their latest WATCHOUT investment allowing for the 30 sources of frame-synced playback for the event. Four high-spec WATCHOUT display servers made handling all aspects of the show an absolute breeze.

"It is always a pleasure to see how an event of this scale comes together, and see how each part unites to make such an impressive whole," says Malcolm Finlay, PENMAC. "The resulting WATCHOUT visuals ran flawlessly and were, without doubt, a real highlight for the delegates and hosts."

Photo credit: Annie Goetzsche