Case studyFestival  ·  IMAG

Bludfest, Milton Keynes National Bowl

Yungblud’s own festival at the National Bowl. Five dwmedia cameras and three crew feeding the video walls, on a rig already built for the week.

Client

UK Events Group

Event

Bludfest

Venue

National Bowl, Milton Keynes

Sector

Festival, live music

Services

IMAG and screens, multi-camera production

Crew

Three

Rig

Five dwmedia cameras, plus a shared jib and RF camera

The brief

Bludfest is Yungblud’s own festival, and it ran at Milton Keynes National Bowl. UK Events Group brought dwmedia in to feed the video walls.

It was one of three headline shows we covered at the Bowl inside the same week, alongside Chase & Status and Reggae Land. The rig stayed where it was for all three.

What made it challenging

An artist-founded festival is a different room from a booked headline slot, and it changes what the screens are for.

The audience at Bludfest is there for one artist specifically. They know the songs, they know the between-song habits, and they have watched a great deal of footage of him already. That makes them harder to satisfy than a general festival crowd, because they can tell when a camera is a beat behind or on the wrong person.

So the cut has to anticipate rather than follow. On a set you do not know, you cover and react. On a set the audience knows better than you do, being late is visible to forty thousand people at once, several metres wide.

The practical answer is preparation rather than more cameras. Knowing the set, knowing which moments the crowd will turn towards each other for, and having somebody on the roving angle who is watching the crowd as much as the stage.

Working a rig somebody else built for

The rig was designed for the week rather than for this one show, which is a constraint worth being honest about. Camera positions that suit an arena-scale dance act are not automatically the right positions for a guitar band with a frontman who works the barrier.

What makes that workable is that the positions were chosen for what the venue can always offer rather than what one show would ideally want. A locked wide that reads at any distance, a long lens that can find a face from front of house, and enough mid-range to cut between them. Those hold up across three quite different bills.

The shared jib and RF camera from another production company on site is what covers the difference. Movement and a roaming angle are exactly what a fixed rig cannot give you, and on a frontman who does not stay put they matter more than an extra locked position would.

The result

Bludfest delivered on a rig that had already covered one headline show that week and went on to cover a third, with no additional build cost carried by any of them.

The National Bowl is the venue we have worked most. Reggae Land has booked us back four consecutive years since 2023, and Chase & Status and Tribes Unite have run there too.