latest news headlines
PSL Takes to the River with Greenpeace
One of Greenpeace's more harmonious spectaculars featured the arrival of the ship Arctic Sunrise at London's Tower Bridge, for a special musical protest against the renewal of the Trident nuclear programme. PSL went down to the Thames riverside to provide full technical services for the event, including a camera team to capture material for Greenpeace's webcast.
Under the direction of project director Pod Bluman, the PSL team delivered equipment for staging, lighting, video, sound reinforcement, video and LED screens for the concert onto the ship. Entitled 5 Minutes to Midnight, a new composition by Damon Albarn was performed by a 50-strong choir called Sense of Sound, with additional contributions from Brian Eno and visuals by Robert del Naja of Massive Attack.
Part of a peaceful demonstration against renewing the UK nuclear weapons system Trident, and against Britain possessing nuclear weapons, the event was attended by a large public audience on the south bank of the river, close to Butlers Wharf.
Butlers Wharf was also the point from which PSL had to 'launch' its equipment, into the hands of production manager Dikka Jones. "We unloaded the truck, wheeled the cases down to the jetty and then up a ramp onto a pontoon," explains Pod Bluman. "Each item had to be taken onto the Arctic Sunrise by crane. At one point, we had 15 tonnes of equipment on the pontoon, just floating in the middle of the Thames."
Greenpeace is a regular client of PSL, which has worked on some of its ground-breaking publicity stunts such as guerilla projection of messages onto the UK's main nuclear power stations. For the 5 Minutes to Midnight event, PSL had just a week to pull all the technical services together, working in collaboration with United Visual Artists (UVA) who were responsible for the graphic content shown on the PSL-supplied large-format LED screen.
26th March 2007
HEADLINES
news archive
search stories
FOOTNOTE: Select the news type you require in the red band above; this will enable you to see the current news stories from that section
© 1999 - 2012 Entertainment Technology Press Limited News Stories
