“I want fire-breathing dragons, or I need it to rain and thunder to get a show going ... I need something really, really amazing to happen up there to get people’s attention.”
Jennifer Donner Smith, Senior Director, Corporate Events at Oracle, shared she has wanted a dramatic open since the first SuiteWorld event in 2011.
With a move of the show from San Jose to Las Vegas this year, she got her wish and lots more and it made for an awesome show - “Next starts Now” the week before.
Watch the video of the opening keynote below. There is so much going on in each frame - then follow along with some of the geeky details that Jennifer and Jeffrey Welk of the production company, Tencue shared with me
The LED Wall
The wall was 50 feet wide by 16 feet high. We used to do projection for that size of screen and our first design was to do a typical projection onto a flat surface, a screen surface. It turns out LED has evolved so fast and so far that we could have the same quality of image at almost the same price point as doing projection. So that was near 4k imagery in LED in a 50 foot screen. And again, two years ago, the capability didn't even exist, and last year it would have been probably twice the price if not five times the price. It also was built onto a lightweight carbon fiber frame which allowed us to do minimal rigging. The LED was mounted on simple chain motors so that we could move the large screen up and down it in and out. When you first walked in it was sitting literally on the floor and flew up about six feet during the opening performance just to give it a different kind of background, different motion.
The 3D mapping
A year ago, we surveyed the keynote room. We did a full 3D pointer array map of the physical exhibit hall so that we could lay out the project with great accuracy in the design phase. It was all HD projection on the white plaster walls of the building. It was 230 feet of projection surface composed of six stacks of projectors. Each stack was 60,000 lumens, so it was a phenomenal amount of projection power on it. That's the equivalent of 360 of the type of projectors you use in your office.
It's controlled by a piece of equipment called a Watchout, which has the detailed pixel map built into the template and therefore we could easily add the content, whether it was video content during the opening, or still content during the presentation. The image size, I believe about I think 9,000-10,000 pixels wide. So, beyond 8K in terms of actual projection quality or image quality.
The imagery
Tencue and a creative agency, Bodie Group generated the actual presentation that you saw on the LED and the coordinating images that were on the back wall. As each speaker's slides were being edited we'd have an idea and we had an on-site designer, who would pull new content ideas. We'd review it quickly, put it into the system and put it on the wall to see if we liked it. Some of the photography was original and some was computer generated. A lot of color enhancement, a lot of compositing in order to create some of that 3D stuff. Remedy Editorial, a creative agency created the opening building scene with the office environments pulsating and vibrating.
The fire pods
Each fire pod had four propane canisters and you choose to set off one, two, or four of them for it to, as far as the height and intensity of the burst and then you pre-selected time or length of burn. Usually when we do indoor pyrotechnics of this type, there is much more stringent Fire Marshal requirements, but these specific types of fire pods are designed for close proximity. And so we only needed to create a 15 foot barrier around each fire pod.
The Haka Dancers
In their business suits earned a Maori compliment of Ka pai! from analyst Ben Kepes who is from New Zealand. "There is a large Hawaiian population in Las Vegas and we got in touch with Hula group and they were enthusiastic. So, no they were all local to Vegas."
The rapper
Lyrics Born, a Japanese-American rapper played MC throughout the keynote in his red and gold kimono
The cadence
So these were a lot of really intentional decisions in terms of how we could keep this experience moving forward for the audience and not feel static. Music selection, whether it was hip-hop music or more rock-and-roll varied dependent on who the presenter was and whether they were following Lyrics Born and those interstitials that Lyrics Born to set up each segment. That's something that (President) Jim McGeever requested. he wanted more, what we describe as texture, he wanted things to happen, cause he had so many different customers coming up on stage, so, on his urging, we came up with the idea of Lyrics Born doing those little set-ups for the industry, for each vertical segment. And we think that added a really nice narrative story to the keynote. Also, NextFest – our Wednesday gala was a 90's theme with special unannounced guests so we teased that with both the old and the new mix in the morning keynotes.
The Vegas edge
You can’t compare. Las Vegas is set up for this kind of thing. And we certainly had gotten to a point that remaining in San Jose was not an option.. It was an enormous upgrade just in the sense of the resources that you have ... across the board, not just for the keynote, but things need to be fixed, there's people to reprint things, ample overnight rooms and space, décor resources etc. Vegas is singular in the world. there's no comparison to the scope and scale of events that can take place in Vegas.
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