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PSL Steers the Scouts to Record-breaking Success
EuroJam was the biggest Scouting and Guiding Event to be held in Europe for ten years, consisting of 12 action-packed days for participants, who travelled from 67 countries. Over 10,000 people camped out on the EuroJam site at Hylands Park, where an extensive entertainment and communications infrastructure was built specially for them.
PSL, from Potters Bar in north London, was responsible for providing all production services on EuroJam's 20-plus stages and 'venues' around the site. Chief among these was the Main Stage, where PSL provided all lighting, trussing, LED screens, video and camera systems. Stage sound was sub-contracted to Concert Sound, under the supervision of PSL's production manager Stef Cebula.
Cebula was in charge of a 20-man crew from PSL and Concert Sound, which worked closely with the team of volunteers from The Scout Association. “Although this event has a tight budget, its importance goes beyond this week,” says Cebula. “EuroJam comes ahead of the 21st World Scout Jamboree in the Movement's centenary year of 2007, which will take place at the same site, and is expected to be four times as large.”
The big occasions held on the main stage, which remains in place for the V Festival, were the Opening and Closing Ceremonies, which were attended by all participants, a crowd of nearly 12,000 people. These big shows featured live music from new artists such as Nate James, performances from the Scouts themselves, and an appearance by actor, producer and TV action man Peter Duncan, who, as Chief Scout, is the public face of the Scout Association.
Flanked by two 5x5 16mm Lighthouse LED screens, the stage carried 36 moving heads of lighting, with 16 x 50in plasma screens and a circular centre panel. Two BARCO projectors, processed via an ArKaos system, introduced EuroJam and other Scouting logos to the centre display. The rest of the programming came via two Catalyst media servers running on Apple G4 computers. Both Catalysts were used in conjunction with a Vector, the first to serve the 16 plasma screens, the second to control four DP Lightning SX video projectors. Lighting director Stuart Knapp, controlling the show from a Hog 2, explains that “budgets were tight because the Scout Association is a charity. We managed to give them a cost-effective moving image background, with images going across the white background as well as on the plasmas.”
To feed the LED screens, and enable the Association to make a record of the EuroJam's main events, PSL provided a six-camera triax system, running through a Snell & Wilcox switchpack. The package included jib, track and dolly, two long lens cameras and two hand-held.
Concert Sound were sub-contracted to provide sound reinforcement; Andy Davies had the task of providing PA systems of varying sizes to all the 20 ‘venues’ around the site, and a full-specification EAW 760 line array system for the main stage.
In overall charge of the event's production team, Mike Bryan, the volunteer technical manager, was tackling an event of this size for the first time. “We've been planning for three or four years,” he explains, “and I first met with Stef Cebula and the PSL team in October. They’ve given me a tremendous amount of guidance and advice, and their expertise has been invaluable. Their support on site has been absolutely brilliant; I would say the crews have ‘made’ the shows, we couldn't have asked for a better team.
5th September 2005
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