Bryan Reesman expands his focus this month from Broadway to 11th Ave. and 34th St., the site of the Jacob Javits Convention Center and New York Comic Con, first launched at Javits by ReedPOP in 2006. This year’s event is set for Oct. 8-11, 2015. —ed.
Last year, New York Comic Con became the largest comic convention in North America, eclipsing its progenitor San Diego Comic Con by attracting 151,000 passionate fans to the Jacob Javits Convention Center over a four-day weekend in mid-October. Promoting and assembling this massive event is a mammoth undertaking, and for the events services crew from the Texas-based Freeman Company for the last four years, it has been a challenging logistical operation.
Every day there are numerous presentations, from movie and television studios and comic book companies that require very quick spot checks with little preparation time. It is literally production on the fly that requires a quick-witted team to respond to rapidly changing conditions, and that will stay true next month when it takes place again in Manhattan between Oct. 8 and 11.
A “Logistics Show”
“With a show like Comic Con, you don’t really rehearse it, but there are a lot of tech checks where basically whoever is the handler of the media wants to come in, see it and hear it,” explains Kyle Gaul, technical director for NYCC and director of technology for Freeman. “If it’s a smaller event, those can tend to be low-key. If it’s a studio event, those can tend to be one of the most stressful parts of any show, just making those entourages happy. It’s actually not a horrendously complicated technical show. It’s more of a logistics show. There’s tons of communication with people and working out what our production capabilities are, what they want to do and how we’re able to do it.”
Video Setup
Freeman brings in all of the sound, lighting and video gear needed for Main Hall 1D (which seats around 3,000 people), Hall 1E (close to the same and the secondary room for the last two years), and Hall 1A, which is subdivided into six smaller rooms for sessions and panels that seat between 100 and 500 people. There are two large video projection screens flanking the Main Hall stage. Hall 1E has columns in it, so Freeman creates a four-screen layout that allows all attendees to see something, even those with an obstructed view.
All of the projection screens that Freeman has been using for NYCC are Daylight Display Systems from Barco. In Hall 1D, the two projection screens are 13.5 by 24 feet, and the two main ones in Hall 1E are 10.5 by 18.8 feet, with the two side screens in that room being 7.5 by 13.4 feet. “We actually hang those,” says Gaul. “That’s the largest screen you can hang and actually walk under. It actually trims about eight’ off the floor. If you’re tall, you can reach up and touch the bottom of the screen.”
In addition to the projectors and screens, the video setup includes Freeman’s HD-2 FlyPack, Sony HXC-100 cameras and HDCAM-SR for recording/playback along with DT Videolabs’ PlaybackPro units and AJA Ki Pro video recorders.
Cable Management
The Main Hall certainly requires a lot of cable, but as Ryan Phelps, production manager for Freeman and NYCC explains, they take most of it up into the balcony, bring it back, then drop it down the stairs to front of house setup right by the front doors at stage left.
“We do ‘Yellow Jacket’ the crap out of it,” says Phelps, referring to the cable protectors, adding that they need keep a modest FOH setup to make way for attendees.
The challenge in Hall 1D/Main Stage is that it has a relatively low ceiling. “If we had the ideal scenario room, we would actually stage that with a massive center screen to do all the content playback on for the audience, but you ultimately can’t do that [here],” says Gaul. “They have a permanent built-in stage that we use where the panel is sitting, and there’s just not enough vertical space there to have a screen of sufficient size that would cover the audience. We have left and right screens, but we do put surround sound in the room, which doesn’t make a whole lot of sense because surround sound is spatial and you’re basically playing to a center screen. With a left and right screen, I can’t spatially play that to left and right screen, but we do it anyways because although it doesn’t read perfectly from a surround sound standpoint, it definitely contributes to the overall dynamic experience of the attendees.”
House-Supplied Lighting
The Javits Center has a stage wash for the Main Hall with a lighting rig mainly comprised of Source Fours, but Freeman keeps thing simple. “We add a couple of specials for people,” says Phelps. “A lot of times people want to do audience pop-ups with a stage person out in the audience somewhere, so we pick them up with a little Leko. Then we run a couple of Source Fours behind to light up that [step and repeat] banner [onstage].”
Halls 1D and 1E feature a lot of visual media, usually previews of upcoming movies and TV shows and occasionally preview episodes of certain shows. While Freeman has ongoing discussions with show organizers ReedPOP throughout the year, the two months leading to the show are when things kick into high gear.
“Most of that is technical conversations dealing with post-production houses, studios and presenters and finding out what they would like to present and what format they can do that in,” explains Gaul. “Ten years ago, we would’ve said digital video and media is going to make our life easier, and in reality it’s made life much harder. There are just so many more options. We used to have a couple of different formats of video tape. Even in digital media, we have lots of talk about codecs and things of that nature.”
Freeman actually does tape playback at NYCC and uses the high-end Sony format HDCAM SR in the bigger rooms. “It is 880 Mbps, and that is substantially more data than you would get with an Apple ProRes file, which is the secondary thing that we do a lot of,” says Gaul. “It is all digital on the tape, but because it is on tape they can get really solid data rates off of that.” The tape format is reliable, and Gaul notes that there can be more technical issues with digital media.
“The hardest part is probably getting all the studios to bring the same formats and actually show up with them in time to test them,” states Phelps. “In that main panel room, it’s nonstop, and like a different studio in every session. We’ve pretty much gotten everyone together to 24P tape, but last year I had someone show up with a Blu-Ray disc. We tried to get it to run for our system. We’ve got the actual show pretty well hooked in the way we do it now. It’s actually kind of nice. The technology is semi-simple.”
Tight Time Frames
The crew gets little preparation time each day. Phelps says they have an hour to fire up their gear and spot check everything before the throngs come in, and occasionally studio reps will come in to test their material. “We send out tech checks for the studios,” he says. “Some of them just come in, pop a tape in and say, ‘Yup, looks good.’ Then they show up and want to do a whole bunch of stuff at the time of the show.”
Most studio reps show up at least once, and their level of intensity varies. “Some of them are a little more hardcore,” remarks Phelps. “The Marvel people don’t want anyone in the room and want to watch every second of every tape. CBS Television Studios will come in and say, ‘Can we just spot check this tape?’” He recalls that Disney repeatedly did surround tests for their video presentation last year, noting that the company is used to a true cinema set-up, which NYCC does not offer. Freeman works with studio reps to set audio levels. Some are louder than others, but they try to use presets for every session if they can check tapes ahead of time.
Audio and Cameras
Sound-wise, they use Renkus?Heinz IC Live systems in Halls 1D and 1E. “It’s a ground stacked, steerable line array system, which actually works for the venue very well,” says Gaul. “It’s a surprisingly high output, very compact footprint system. We’ve become a big fan of the system and continue to grow our inventory of them a lot because it allows us to go in with a pretty quick ground supported set up that gets us lots of coverage, as opposed to hanging rows and rows of speakers. In the big room, we use JBL VerTec.” They also use delay boxes behind each column in the Main Hall.
For Halls 1D and 1E and the bigger rooms in dissected Hall 1A, cameras are present. “If there’s not media being shown on the screens, then we’re doing I-Mag,” says Gaul. “At most Comic Cons, there is some media asset with the session and then discussion. There’s never speaker support, if you will, of somebody doing PowerPoint. That’s very rare.”
The Crew
Freeman operates a crew of eight or nine people, most of them operating in a managerial capacity. After the Teamsters load them into the building, Freeman employs IBEW electricians and IATSE 306 projectionists, comprising about eight to ten crew people. Within the Freeman camp, says Gaul, “there are a couple of us that have some technical horsepower because, as the contractor, we’re the last line of defense with anything. But I feel we have a great working relationship with both those unions, and the more I work with them the better it gets. For the most part, they have a great attitude in terms of doing what it takes to get the job done.” Workdays at NYCC generally start around 8 a.m. and run until 10 p.m., with only 15-minute breaks between panels and events and no defined lunch or dinner breaks.
Snafus are reportedly rare at NYCC. Phelps reveals that last year, at the end of the session focusing on the CBS crime drama Elementary, while co-star Lucy Liu was talking onstage, “one of our L1430 connectors fried up in the balcony, and we lost front of house. Thankfully, it was 55 minutes into an hour-long session. That was not a super easy fix. We started swapping everything at front of house and got half of it back, but we actually had to trace during the break to find it.”
“The year before, we lost a projector in the big room the very first thing in the morning on the last day of the show,” recalls Gaul. “It was the last thing you would ever suspect, but it looked like we had an electrical problem with the service that fed our main distro. When something is powered up and working for a couple of days, it’s not really something that you would suspect. It was one of those head scratchers, but we got things going right away. We had backups. Knock on wood, it’s pretty rare for us to have any kind of service failure.”
For a show with a quick load-in (two days at most for some areas), it loads out even faster. NYCC wraps up on Sunday night at 5 p.m., and Freeman has the directive to be out of the building by midnight. (Gaul says they usually get out around 10 p.m.) Despite the stress factor involved with NYCC, Gaul and Phelps enjoy working on the show every year.
“Comic Con is probably my most fun show just because of the interaction with all of the different people,” says Phelps, who worked on the show in 2013 and 2014. “They aren’t doctors or oil guys or corporate guys just babbling on. The one thing I don’t like working about the show is that I never have the chance to get up to the exhibit floor. I’ve never seen it when it was open.” (There’s always NYCC 2015 next month.)
Gaul finds NYCC to be an exciting event. “It’s fun because it’s not just us involved in the staff, it’s everybody including Reed involved in the show,” he says. “Everybody involved is committed to this process and this schedule, which is grueling for everybody, and with that there is some [sense of] accomplishment to pulling the whole thing off. Especially when the show wraps, you can sit back and say, ‘Hey, we survived.’”
