Working closely with festival organisers C Squared and Talbot Productions, Topaz provided all the video and Graphics for the show both leading up to and on the night. Preparations began the week before with all the design work and creation of the Keynote graphics in London. These where all proofed before the effects where added and everything packed up for the short hop to Montreux.
Once we were on the ground we set to work gathering all the shortlists videos and re-encoding them to a ProRes HD video format and dropping them into the Keynote graphics ready for rehearsals. The short trip to the venue was made to join the rest of the crew where we plugged into a 3 screen projector rig and began our final tweaks.
For the show we had two MacBook Pros running Keynote to play out both the HD graphics and the videos. The second machine ran as a backup in unison with the first and both where providing audio to the sound desk via firewire audio interfaces. Rehearsals where finished in good time and the audience arrived to take their seats around 8pm.
Following a short welcoming speech by presenter Charlie Crowe, the guests sat down to enjoy dinner as we made our final checks ahead of the awards. To start the Show the “Oompah Brass” band entertained the audience with their unique blend of popular hits played in a German Oompah style.
The awards show then kicked off in fine style with each category showcasing each winners work with a video. There were plenty of smiles as each winner collected their awards for some great campaigns across the year
Ending after midnight, it’s one of the latest finishes we’ve seen and the audience where having a great time enjoying every part of it. The party continued late into the night at the after party and was still going by the time we packed up to leave!
All in all, a really great show to work on with some very inspiring and creative uses of cross platform media campaigns, certainly a show we enjoy doing at Topaz! We look forward to next year with great anticipation and send our congratulations to all the shortlisted, highly commended and winning entrys
You can read more on the Awards here at the Festival of Media website.
