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AVT Meets Canary Wharf Glass Dome Challenge with LX100
Based in Canary Wharf, AVT London specialises in producing live events for a wide range of corporate clients, including Reuters, various banks and The Canary Wharf Group.
Much of the company’s work takes place at the Cabot Hall and East Wintergarden on Canary Wharf (both venues for which they are the preferred suppliers) although AVT has produced events throughout the UK and abroad.
Established seven years ago, AVT London uses Christie as its preferred projection supplier. Requiring high production values, they recently invested in their second RoadRunner LX100 four-lamp system, having sensed that the optimised 10,000 ANSI lumens output was what was required to cut through the considerable daylight emissions in the 32-metre high glass palace dome of the East Wintergarden.
This is a difficult location at the best of times, says AVT’s London manager, Dan Hall, and when Canary Wharf Management’s Arts & Events team wanted to present a four-film season based around multi-Oscar winning musicals recently, the company knew it faced a challenge.
“The problem with the East Wintergarden is there is no blackout,” said Dan. “We had been investigating a number of different solutions, including 84in plasma screens, but the image reflects off the marble floor. Using LX100 projection we are able to use a rear blackout up to 35ft, to prevent the ambient light hitting the back of the screen. This really provided a wow factor, and a high degree of contrast.”
The acid test, he believes, is accurately representing the grey grid on a white background. “With other projectors we lose the grey lines entirely, whereas the RoadRunner faithfully maintains the contrast.”
Fitted with a 1:2.6 medium zoom lens, the LX100 was flown off the house front truss, projecting in 4:3 aspect ratio (converted to 16:9 widescreen). “Having the horizontal and vertical lens shift facility is really useful,” says Dan. “In fact with the spread of lens offered by Christie you can always find one to suit any situation without compromising the output.” In this instance the projector was also used to show a mixture of Powerpoint-fed interval clips and pre-show announcements.
Although AVT also has a pair of Christie LX45s in its rental fleet — which Dan Hall says are ideal for conference work — the LX100 is now his standard projector for coping with all the exigencies that the East Wintergarden has to throw at him. This included a recent event in the Gallery Room for the Climate Group, who wanted projection onto an overhead sailcloth. “The cloth was not only quite porous but also curved — and with the projector fixed at a 35°-40° angle, using maximum keystoning, it worked really effectively.”
Another recent event was for Reuters staff at the Cabot Hall, which included simultaneous global announcements, using Powerpoint and DVD playback. The high contrast levels for video resulted in another major success.
Meanwhile, outside the capital, AVT used the LX100 with truss-mounted 4m x 3m screens for an Evening Argus Awards night at Brighton Metropole.
Now the company is preparing for a high-level event in Greece next June. “This will operate purely in HDTV, and so we will have two RoadRunners projecting onto a central screen and two LX45’s on the side,” promises Dan. “We will be handling the complete image projection output, working in conjunction with full rock and roll concert production lighting.”
10th February 2006
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