A belated Happy New Year from everyone at Delta Live.
December was a busy month delivering for the 18th year, London’s New Year’s Eve celebrations, the details of which were kept under wraps by City Hall officials and the Mayor of London until just hours before.
London’s New Year’s Eve did not include it’s famous public fireworks display on the banks of the Thames this year. Instead, a broadcast spectacular, shown live on BBC One to millions of viewers, was the centrepiece of this year’s celebrations.
The show used state of the art technology featuring fireworks, lasers and the UK’s largest ever drone show to showcase London to the world, looking back at the defining moments of 2021 and celebrating London roaring back to life as we look ahead to 2022.
Much of the show was centred over the Old Royal Naval College in Greenwich, but footage was shot from The Shard, Big Ben, Tower Bridge, Millennium Bridge, St Paul’s Cathedral and Shakespeare’s Globe, and broadcast live from Tate Modern. Our technical brief was to network all 8 sites together for audio, communications and event timings. This was complicated to achieve and involved both fixed infrastructure and point to point links.
It’s no exaggeration to say that our audio and communications equipment needed to be split-second accurate as a countdown beamed out from The Shard, before Big Ben’s famous bongs rang out to mark the start of 2022 and a unique 13-minute show. There was a one-second latency in the TV image footage from the Naval College to our central London hub location, so we had to offset everything that fired in Greenwich by a second to align our audio playback and the live performances. It had to be bang on the frame.
This year’s show was also the first time live performances were included in a tribute to London’s vibrant cultural industry. The West End Musical Choir performed from Shakespeare’s Globe, while Millennium Bridge hosted Hamilton actor Giles Terera performing a specially written poem by Tomfoolery. We provided 85 vocal microphones to the choir in Shakespeare’s Globe, and an array of wireless receivers and transmitters to the performances on the Millennium Bridge.
Jim Donald, production director at Jack Morton, spoke to Access All Areas about the event, and was asked about the challenges of delivering a live broadcast of this scale:
“From a technical point of view bringing in multiple sites. Some people will think it was pre-recorded and that the drones were computer-generated, but everything was live. We had weather challenges. We had a whole alphabet of contingency plans in case the drones couldn’t fly because it was raining or we couldn’t use fireworks because fallout would go in a certain direction. Of course there’s the challenge of Covid. We were all testing every day. You’ve got a whole mix of contingencies to deal with which make 12 minutes of TV quite complex to pull off in a live environment.”
We’d have to say we agree!
We’d like to extend a huge thank you to Jack Morton for inviting us to be part of this special event for the 18th time, and look forward to working together during a brighter 2022!
You can watch the full show below:
If you’d like to enquire about how we can help with your live broadcasts, or any live events you may be planning, please do get in touch with us at enquiries@deltalive.com.
Featured image by @photobenphoto.
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