End of another year with Eastbourne College

For the second year running we were contracted by Eastbourne College to provide technical support for their 6th form leavers event, The Cornflower Ball which takes place annually in the Winter Gardens, Eastbourne.

As an added twist the College made the decision to hold their end of year Speech Day prize giving event in the Winter Gardens as well. These contrasting events, A formal prize giving event for 1200 people and then a black tie dinner/dance for 400 were scheduled in the same venue and only a few hours apart. As we were already involved with the Cornflower Ball we were then asked to provide technical cover for the Speech Day prize giving as well.

Contrasting events of this nature call for similar but very different setups.

For the Speech Day event we had to provide a full AV package as well as sound and additional lighting. Due to the size and width of the Floral hall sight lines are often tricky so we installed 2 65" televisions either side of the stage showing not only what was being projected onto the main screen but camera feeds of the stage as well. This feed was then emulated into the Gold room which was being used for overflow due to the numbers of people attending. This system was all controlled by our Blackmagic ATEM Production Studio.

On completion of the Formal part of the day we then started the changeover into the Cornflower Ball. This event had a completely different look and feel as we had installed an extensive lighting package including 24 led pars, our Rush Beam units and 3 Mirrorballs.. The biggest being a metre in width! Sound for the evenings entertainment (The fantastic Pitband Allstars) was covered by our Opus System and was controlled by our Roland M-5000c.

Back to back events like this in such a tight timeframe are always a challenge but we were extremely happy with the result. Our thanks goes out to the organisers and to our amazing team who made it all happen.