The Baku 2017 ISG Ceremonies were staged in the Baku National Stadium, the same venue we worked in for the European Games in 2015. The Opening and Closing Ceremonies were produced by Betty Productions, with Catherine Ugwu as the Executive Producer. Auditoria was engaged to look after the audio for the Ceremonies and the launch event for the torch relay.
The audio system, designed by Scott Willsallen, consisted of a distributed arrangement of 14 ground stacked arrays of six L-Acoustics K2 and seven SB28 subwoofers. We had K2 delays for the upper bowl as well as additional arrays of K2 mounted within the projection screen for sound effects localisation. The total loudspeaker count was 182 K2, 84 SB28 and lots of smaller format products for monitoring and fill systems.
The control system consisted of a dual-redundant pair of DiGiCo SD7's for FOH, another pair of Monitors and a comprehensive Optocore signal transport network distributing the signals throughout the stadium. The replay system consisted of a dual-redundant pair of Fairlight machines as used on Baku 2015 and many other major event projects.
Our team for the Ceremonies included the following:
- Scott Willsallen, Audio Director
- Richard Sharratt, FOH mix engineer
- Steve Logan and Luis Miranda, Replay operators
- Justin Arthur, Audio technical manager
- Andy Rose, Broadcast audio mix engineer.
The equipment and crew was supplied by Agora from Italy with Giulio Rovelli managing the team.