Tomorrowland, the international dance music festival founded by Dutch concert promoters ID&T and staged in Boom, Belgium since 2005, branched out to the U.S. in 2013 with TomorrowWorld, which featured a roster of 300+ EDM artists and a collective audience of 140,000 for its Sept. 27-29 debut in in Chattahoochee Hills, Georgia, outside Atlanta.
SFX Entertainment and its owner, Robert F. X. Sillerman, played a key role in bringing Tomorrowland to the U.S., starting as joint venture partner. Early in 2013, as the inaugural TommorrowLand event was taking shape, SFX announced plans to purchase a 75 percent stake in ID&T, and by late October, a month after the first U.S. event, SFX announced a deal to purchase ID&T outright.
The main stage for the 2013 event’s debut in Georgia, dubbed “The Book of Wisdom,” echoed the setup for the ID&T festival’s main stage in Belgium during the summer of 2012. The 2014 event, which drew even bigger crowds to the Bouckaert Farm in Chattahoochee Hills Sept. 26-28, was themed “The Arising of Life,” and used a volcano as the visual centerpiece, mirroring the look of the 2013 edition of Tomorrowland in Belgium.
In all, there were seven major stages across the wooded, 8,000-acre site bordering the Chattahoochee River for the 2014 event, with a total audience of close to 160,000 attending performances during the festival’s three days of shows. This year also featured “The Gathering,” a pre-event concert, for the 40,000 staying over in the festival’s Dreamville camping area.
For the 2014 rendition of this epic event, ID&T once again drew on its core of in-house designers in set, lighting, sound, and video. The challenge to the producers of the event was to bring in talented vendors that could realize their vision. Everything had to be on budget and on time, of course, utilizing technology to reflect the theme.
Enter NEP Screenworks
NEP has been in business for more than 30 years developing and applying new technologies and solutions to meet or create industry standards in the entertainment, sports, and special event industry. The company has the largest fleet of mobile production trucks in the world, including more than 50 high-definition production trucks, 3D-dedicated production trucks and a full line of standard-definition edit and support trucks. The company headquarters and full production studios are based in Pittsburgh, PA, with a global presence of facilities across the U.S., Europe, Australia, and Brazil. Meredith Knight, marketing manager for NEP, notes that with industry-leading experts, top engineers, and the industry’s largest pool of resources, clients have come to expect the firepower, flexibility, and peace of mind they need in order to focus on the production instead of worrying about the production equipment.
That many stages over that much ground required a huge solution to capture the live video displays on stage as well as all the action for the worldwide webcast. For more than 20 years, as part of NEP, Screenworks has been providing video display solutions in sports, concerts, and corporate events. Not just a rental house, Screenworks has developed a staff and crew of engineers and LED techs committed to the success of every production. The hallmark of the company is that it blends an artistic feel with cutting-edge technology, providing road-worthy solutions to concert touring and events across the country. Screenworks’ list of clients are as diverse as Madonna, Rush, and Lenny Kravitz to WrestleMania, Nike, NASCAR, ESPN and American Idol, and the company has been recognized with industry honors including the Parnelli Award for Video Production Company of the Year. Their festival team was up to the task of supplying LED display solutions.
Peter Kimball, Screenworks’ senior account manager of U.S. mobile units, gives an overview of the scope of the project. “We brought in NEP’s Platinum, Blues and Mercury mobile production trucks. One contained our master control and editing suite, a second provided web-link transmission, and the third had the mini control vans for the individual stages. Master control handled feeds from nine manned and two robotic cameras, as well as feeds from the control vans, which had their own director for each of the stages.”
A crew of eight NEP engineers and a team of 65 technicians worked to capture video and audio from four of the stages while an audio feed captured the other three stages. DVI routers utilizing military grade fiber optic totaling over 10,000 feet fed the screens on all stages. The event streamed live for six hours over YouTube, then played back three times before the next live stream, totaling 72-hours of non-stop music content.
“Peter handled all the webcasts on the event,” says Knight, “while Randy Mayer from our Screenworks division handled all the display screens.” Mayer, director of concert touring for NEP Screenworks adds, “We did our initial site survey in May 2014 and it was just non-stop preparation from that point on, including a follow-up to the site in August.”
A 33-Screen Event
Screenworks provided 33 screens for the event, utilizing almost 2,300 feet of LED. The Volcano (main stage) had three X7- HD screens in the center. Flanking them on either side were walls made up of the X-10 tiles. “The X7, a seven mil screen, is a propriety piece developed by Screenworks for the touring market,” says Mayer. “It delivered the impact necessary for that particular stage.”
Units in the X7-HD are framed into square modules, with 16,384 pixels per module. Each pixel on the video display panel consists of red, green, and blue in an SMD LED for wide-angle viewing without color shift. According to the specs on the X7, this LED display technology can achieve almost any look, indoors or out, for concert tours, television stages, corporate displays, sports, and entertainment events with exceptional brightness and flexibility.
Developing the X7-HD has allowed NEP Screenworks to design lighter, more compact panels that take up much less space during transport and require less time and work during setup, making it possible to deploy extra-large screens rapidly. Upon arrival for setup, the Screenworks crew saw that all set pieces and décor were already in place.
“All the preplanning that had gone on previously helped us to get the screens placed,” notes Mayer. While acknowledging that “going in, around, and through scenic pieces after they have been set is not ideal,” he credits his project manager, Brad Reiman, along with eight of Screenworks crew members, along with local labor provided by Backbone Productions for their work clearing the hurdles. “It went smoothly, thanks to our guys and the quality techs provided by Backbone.”
NEP also provided seven high-resolution screens for signage throughout the festival grounds. These signs provided directions to stages, camping, concessions, and various other venue locations from a central safety and security office control. These screens served a secondary purpose as part of an emergency plan, delivering additional information for evacuation instructions in case of lightning or other hazards.
“Atlanta and Nashville have a real good source of TV and broadcast people as far as we’re concerned, but we still had to fly people in from around the country to pull this together,” says Kimball. “Second Wind is our go-to company when sourcing highly technical talent.” NEP hired 65 freelancers to fill the director’s, camera, tape operators, video engineers, as well as audio positions. Kimball adds that, although discussions for this project and the bid process started two years out, “we did not get confirmed until just weeks before the event. Our biggest challenge on this project was the time constraint, as there was quite a bit of editing and time shift processing.”
Meredith points out that NEP and Screenworks have been working together for more than 20 years. “Our longstanding working relationship,” she notes, “provides that give-and-take necessary for everyone to get their aspect of the project complete in an atmosphere Peter lightheartedly compares to a ‘circus.’” Overall, Screenworks spent 10 days on site from set through strike. NEP’s video and broadcast crew time totaled seven days. CK Productions of Belgium produced the live webcast. Creative Force IDT produced the event, not only utilizing the structure they had created for their Belgium festival but also their own core of producers to create the media content.
For more information on NEP Screenworks, go to nepscreenworks.com.
