LONDON — For the seventh consecutive year, XL Video supplied screens, projection, an HD PPU and control for the 2009 BRIT Awards which were presented by comedians Mathew Horne and James Corden and Kylie Minogue. Staged at Earls Court, London, and broadcast live on ITV 1, the event was jointly project managed for XL by Chris Saunders and Paul Wood. Saunders coordinated the cameras and control, while Wood managed the screens and specials.
As Saunders clocked up his 15th Brits, sadly it was also his first not working with long standing production manager Mick Kluczynski, who died suddenly 10 days earlier. Saunders and Wood both worked closely with the MJK Productions’ technical team, with lighting designer Al Gurdon and set designer Nicoline Refsing from Stufish, plus The Brits TV production.
“The Brits was a great tribute to Mick’s amazing technical, practical and communication skills and his ability to see the big picture,” said Saunders. “He was the first person to have wanted the show to go on, but it’s definitely not the same without him.”
The center onstage screen elements consisted of 80 square meters of 11mm F-LED, a product that has been specially developed by and for XL, and is available exclusively from XL. Another 30 square meters of Lighthouse 7mm was used for the presenter screen.
An integral element of the stage design was a pyramid shaped projection backdrop, which was fed by 12 Christie S20+ projectors all rigged and focused at different angles. Getting these lined up correctly was a challenge for the XL crew. The individual projector outputs were aligned and soft-edged together to produce one large image.
Four Catalyst media servers were programmed and run by Richard Turner via a WholeHog II console. In addition, the playback set up featured two Doremi hard drives, a Virtual VTR and two stills stores. Outputs from all of these, two GV LDK 8000 HD cameras also supplied by XL as part of the IMAG mix, together with seven broadcast camera feeds were all processed via a Barco Encore multi-screen control system. Operator James Morden sent the relevant content to screens.
All the pre-recorded video playback material was supplied by the production. The majority was created by Hello Charlie, with Onedotzero supplying special footage for the Pet Shop Boys’ performance, which closed the live action and followed their acceptance of the Outstanding Contribution to Music Performance Award.
One of XL’s HD PPUs was at the core of the live screen IMAG mix cut by Ollie Bartlett. This was based around a Grass Valley HD Kayak mixer, fed by the two XL cameras plus another seven HD feeds supplied from the CTV OB directed by Phil Heyes.
XL also augmented the IMAG by supplying two flown side projection screens that were fed by Barco ELMs and inserted PiP IMAG into the pyramid projection system.
XL’s 20 person crew included LED crew chief Paul “PJ” Maddock-Jones and projectionist Warren Galt.
For more information, please visit www.xlvideo.tv.
