Case studyLive music · outdoor

Symphonic Ibiza, Harrogate

A 40-piece orchestra playing dance anthems outdoors for Okoru Events, with Heather Small, Rebecca Ferguson and Alison Limerick on vocals. Trailer, four PTZs and an operated front of house camera, cut live on the night.

Client: Okoru Events, Bristol
Location: Harrogate
Sector: Live music
Services: Multi-camera production, IMAG
Rig: OB trailer, four PTZs, one operated FOH camera
On the bill: Heather Small, Rebecca Ferguson, Alison Limerick, Vernon Kay

The Symphonic Ibiza stage at the Great Yorkshire Showground during the build, with the site still empty

The brief

Okoru Events run Symphonic Ibiza, a 40-piece orchestra playing dance anthems, outdoors. Heather Small, Rebecca Ferguson and Alison Limerick sang, with a DJ warm-up and Vernon Kay bringing Radio 2’s Dance Sounds of the 90s as the support set.

dwmedia covered it from the trailer, cut live on the night.

What made it challenging

An orchestra cuts completely differently to a band.

With a four-piece you know where everything is. The guitar solo comes from stage left, the drummer is behind, and an operator can cover the whole show from two or three positions because the interesting thing keeps returning to the same places.

Forty players means the interesting thing is never in the same place twice. The line moves from strings to brass to percussion within a single track, and by the time an operator has found the section that is playing, the phrase has moved on. Covering that properly needs more angles than you can put operators on, and it needs them held rather than hunting.

That is what the PTZs are for. Four of them sit on sections you could never physically get an operator into once the audience is in, and they stay locked on those sections rather than trying to follow the music. The operated front of house camera holds the wide and takes the soloists, and everything else fills in around it.

Outdoors adds the usual complication. No permanent infrastructure, everything arrives on a vehicle, and the light changes across the set in a way it never does indoors.

dwmedia operator cutting the show from the gallery at Symphonic Ibiza

What was deployed

The OB trailer as the gallery
Four PTZ cameras on orchestral sections
One operated camera at front of house
Cut live on the night

Scaffold camera tower going up beside the Symphonic Ibiza stage

The Symphonic Ibiza stage and site at the Great Yorkshire Showground

An outdoor site with no permanent infrastructure is a planning problem rather than a technical one. Our own connectivity, our own crew and our own kit travel to every job, and we work to the production schedule you already have.

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