BBC Studios Showcase 2020

Client: BBC Studios
Venue: M&S Bank Arena, Liverpool, England
Date: February 2020

Hundreds of television buyers from across the globe headed to M&S Bank Arena, Liverpool for BBC Studios Showcase 2020, the World’s largest international television market hosted by a single distributor. The event, for which we provided the technical production, brought together top producers, talent and BBC executives as well as Britain’s most successful creatives.

Line of business: Television

We Delivered: Technical Execution

Client Needs

Celebrating bold, British creativity and previewing some of the BBC’s top programmes, we were briefed to deliver full technical production for two hotly anticipated evening events. With a focus on delivering an extraordinary guest experience that immersed guests in the content, we worked closely with our client to produce and deliver a spectacular yet complementary production design for each of the two evenings.

Solution

Night One kicked off with a stylish Doctor Who drinks reception hosted on a curve-fronted 1.000m² 5-metre-high platform over a section of the arena’s tiered seating and floor. This allowed for a dramatic reveal of the immersive dining space below which was themed around upcoming series The Watch.

Our team then had a 13-hour overnight turn-around to completely transform the space into a glamourous gala dinner for 570 guests. Celebrating BBC Studio’s programme A Perfect Planet, a mammoth LED screen immersed guests in the spectacular BBC content. A stunning 4 metre-diameter sphere made of leaves created from recycled window sticker offcuts provided an incredible focal point in the centre of the space. 

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Tech Specs

Night one
  • Four large ROE CB3 LED screens, were installed around the space to display fictional adverts as well as displaying footage from the TV show and vibrant custom graphics from DJ Mark Ronson who provided the evening’s entertainment. We used two Disguise 4x4Pro media servers for playback, with switching via two Barco E2s.
  • An abundance of theming and 15 shipping containers created the industrial atmosphere – a logistical challenge that required the assistance of a crane to stack the units. 
Night Two
  • The LED screen measured a whopping 30m wide x 7.2m high.
  • To allow the sphere to descend and then the leaves to fall, we used Kinesys for truss movement whilst 16 specialist 4m electro-braked spiked kabuki bars were used to drop the 530m of leaves.