36 l April 2014
www.psneurope.com
livereport RUSSIA Veni, vidi, vici
Agorà’s audio system impressed everyone at the Ceremonies of Sochi 2014. Mike Clark got the lowdown from the Italian team
A huge icebreaker flies into the Paralympics Opening Ceremony
ITALIAN CREATIVITY and technical ability was to the fore at this year’s Olympic and Paralympic games Opening and Closing Ceremonies at Sochi’s Fisht Stadium. An audience of around 40,000
watched 2,000 performers in the specially built arena, following the official launch by president Putin on the 7 February. The event was not without incident, as a much-publicised technical hitch meant a snowflake ‘device’ failed to convert into an Olympic ring. The organiser poked fun at itself by purposefully highlighting the malfunction in the Closing Ceremony. The audio delivery was
reported to be untroubled by comparison. L’Aquila-based Agorà, Italy’s largest audio and lighting rental firm, won the international tender to supply the impressive audio system designed by Auditoria’s Scott Willsallen for the four ceremonies. In fact, Italians filled creative as well as technical roles in Russia, including Lida Castelli, artistic director and director of the Paralympics closing ceremony (one of the few women to have held this role), Marco Balich, artistic executive producer of
The view from beneath the seats during set-up
the Olympic closing ceremony and executive producer of the Paralympics ceremonies, and Daniele Finzi Pasca, director of the Olympics closing ceremony. Agorà is no newcomer to
Olympic events, having supplied equipment and technicians for Turin’s 2006 Winter Olympic Games. Agorà CEO Vittorio DeAmicis
explains, “We shipped nine containers of equipment to Sochi,
where our 35-member team, led by project manager Giulio Rovelli and crew chief and technical co-ordinator Angelo Camporese, began work on installation at the end of November, supervised by Auditoria.” Just a few figures are
sufficient to give an idea of the sheer scale of the Abruzzo company’s work: 530 L-Acoustics loudspeaker systems (including 94 SB28 subwoofers and 230 K2
variable curvature line source systems, literally just off the production line); 450 personal monitor systems; 15 DiGiCo digital audio consoles; a 24-node Optocore dual- redundant signal distribution ring, 135 L-Acoustics LA8 amps for the main rig and a 150-cabinet paging system. As far as the actual sound
reinforcement was concerned. eight signal routing nodes were
L-Acoustics 530
loudspeaker systems were deployed for the opening and closing ceremonies of the Sochi Olympic and Paralympic games
flown from the stadium roof and eight more in the sub stage under the ‘field of play’ (FOP), of which two were dedicated to the stages and six to the PA system. For the Olympics Ceremonies, 16 hangs (12 with nine K2 and four subs each and four with nine K2) were flown from the roof for the top part of the stands and on the Field of Play twenty stacked clusters (four K2 and three subs) covered the lower part of the stands. Two additional hangs (with 12 dV-DOSC and four dV-SUB) were used to boost the sonic effect of a huge locomotive that flew down the length of the FOP in one of the segments.
Photo: Luca Parisse
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