Festival of Life 2009

SFL are pleased to work with the FOL team once again!

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SFL were once again approached to provide the technical solution for the all night prayer event in November only this time it was bigger! SFL worked very closely with the the FOL Technical Production Manager, Ayobami Olunloyo to improve on the solutions we have provided on previous events.

Festival of Life is an overnight event held at The ExCeL Centre in London’s Docklands. The event started at 7pm on the Friday evening and finished at 6am on Saturday morning. FOL is the biggest all night prayer event in Europe with people gathering from all over the world just in this one venue. SFL were the first company to provide the full technical solution for a Festival of Life event.

SFL hung 36 drops of d&b line array to cover the 36,000 seater congregation. This ensured an even coverage of sound across the venue to ensure the audience could hear everything being said from the stage without having to strain to hear. There were sections of drapes hung around the venue from floor to ceiling to help with the acoustics and cut down on the reverberence. There was also an 80m wide baffle drape at the rear to prevent slap back onto the stage. FOH was run from Yamaha digital mixer and we used a Yamaha & Allen & Heath monitor board to mix and manage the 26 monitor mixes. SFL also utilised an Aviom IEM system so that the main band members could manage their own monitor mixes.

The venue was 300m from the stage to the last seat so a huge part of our task was to make sure people still felt included when sat that far back and make sure there was a great looking decent sized screen. Therefore SFL put two 8m wide 16:9 screens at the front. One on each side of the stage projected onto by over 20,000 lumens of Barco DLP projection. There were four 16' x 9' delay screens projected onto by 10,000 lumen Barco DLP projectors. All the image processing was managed by Barco Screen Pro II's. Due to the distance from the front to the back screens and the audio delay we wanted to ensure that the lip sync was still spot on, so they adopted video transport systems and processing with minimum delay. “We refused to make any compromises!” Said SFL’s AV Manager Craig Lawrence

SFL flew 3 lighting trusses to give ultimate flexibility above the 80' wide x 50' deep stage. A combination of various 2k and 1k fresnels and profiles were used for general wash lighting. There were over 40 moving head fixtures and 40 generic fixtures. The backdrop to the stage was made from four 8m long strips of Colour Web LED and five 8m lengths of a white silk drape. The LED provided moving visuals to compliment the stage lighting; this was run from a Hippo Critter. The silks were lit from above and below using Chroma panels and Colour Punch lights. All the lighting was controlled from a Vista desk.