Glastonbury 2009 - behind the scenes at ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ Red Button
Post categories: Inside ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ Red Button,Ìýmusic
| 10:15 UK time, Friday, 3 July 2009
While the sun shone, "The Boss" rocked and the crowds cheered at this year's Glastonbury festival a small group of people were hard at work many miles away from the mud and music in a couple of small rooms in the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳'s Television Centre in White City. It was here that the hub of ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳'s Red Button Glastonbury service was situated.
I found myself working in Playout Gallery TC 8 over the Friday and Sunday nights managing the Red Button back end systems, and thought I would provide a little insight into how the behind the scenes action takes place for a huge event in the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳'s calendar like Glastonbury.
For those who have never been in a Playout Gallery I will attempt to describe it: a couple of smallish rooms with one wall completely dominated by TV monitors all of which display the various incoming and outgoing feeds. Imposing sound desks and PC and laptop computers complete the setup all of which is usually mood lit so it feels like you are sitting in a New York nightclub. In fact why describe it when I can show it!
Each of the rooms is managed by the outgoing and incoming producers respectively and staffed by up to 10 people. The outgoing room is responsible for what you the viewer will be seeing onscreen - i.e. each of the graphics that appear onscreen to tell you who the band is and what song is playing etc - while the incoming room is receiving the content from our team on site and attempting to schedule this into our broadcast.
My job for the night was to update the Red Button application itself - this means that every time a new act was shown I would be updating all the video stream labels as well as trying to ensure that the text pages were accurately reflecting what bands were coming up. I would also be enabling and disabling video streams as they came available. In theory this is a simple task but throw in a number of conflicting factors and it becomes increasingly complicated!
The main issue unfortunately centred around the system I was using in order to make these changes. The bespoke content management tool we use to build the majority of our Red Button products is great for creating a static service, but throw it in a live environment where changes have to be made every couple of minutes and it usually dies a slow and horrible death. We're building a new tool which will cope a lot better, but it won't be ready until later in the summer. So if you were ever watching and noticed that the video label took a while to change to the new band or that the Now and Next schedules seemed to be behind then spare a thought for me as I yelled obscenities at my laptop waiting for it to update!
Running a live event on the scale of Glastonbury is obviously a difficult and complicated task. In particular what we can show via the Red Button is dependent on a number of different factors including rights issues, compliance issues and most significantly what content we have available.
The incoming and outgoing producers have the unenviable task of attempting to schedule the content that we have available on the streams we have available. They are trying to provide as much variety as possible while also trying to have a different act on each stream at any one time. They are relying on our team onsite to as quickly as possible record and edit down a set into around 25-30 mins worth of footage.
This then has to be sent down the line to us in the Playout Gallery where someone has to watch the entire set to check for any editorial or technical issues before it is then able to be broadcast. Given the chaotic nature of a festival event this means that quite often content coming down the line is delayed and when you consider the fact that most of the headlining acts took to the stage later in the evening it meant that we were sometimes forced to repeat certain acts more than we would have liked. So if you were sitting at home thinking "They're showing Lily Allen again!", there was a good reason for it!
An environment of ordered chaos seems to reign when the festival is in full swing and we have all of the streams in use; People rushing from room to room, telephones ringing, music playing, people shouting out notifications of what might be coming down the line or changing onscreen and occasionally voices on the talkback system cutting through it all like some omnipotent God. Needless to say it can get a bit manic but I guess that's part of the fun of it all. The majority of those involved over the weekend have volunteered their time and I imagine that they, like me, would happily do so again. Even if it meant yelling like a crazy person at a laptop in the early hours of Monday morning!
I hope that through it all you tuned in and enjoyed many of the bands we had on offer and also that now you have a little more of an understanding on how it all works. Why don't you let us know what some of your favourite Glastonbury 2009 moments were? For me it would have to be Lady Gaga's exploding outfit, Bruce "The Boss" Springsteen rocking out and one of my favourite acts, Bon Iver, performing a set of simple & haunting elegance.
Chris Tangye is an Assistant Development Producer for ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ Red Button.
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