The Coronavirus pandemic may have dominated 2020’s news cycles, but the US Presidential election was a close second in terms of coverage, with news channels in the USA and around the world following the build up to election day and the controversial aftermath. Now that the election has been decided, the team at Rocket Surgery, Ross Video’s in-house creative services division, can pause and reflect on their work during the campaign.

With over 15 years serving the events industry and providing a complete range of AV production services, Australian company Audio Visual Events® (AVE®) continued with its precise level of technological achievement and client satisfaction even when live events ground to a halt. By partnering with Create Engage and Sydney Masonic Centre (SMC), the company brought ON AIR to life, offering a plethora of high-end Audio Visual and virtual event capabilities, enhanced by powerful and intuitive Brompton Tessera processing.  
 

Friday afternoon on a livestream broadcast, IBC presented its highest award to the news organisations of the world. This is the first time in its history that it has recognised an entity rather than a single individual or organisation. The IBC2020 International Honour for Excellence acknowledged the critical role news broadcasters have played in continuing to inform and educate audiences during the COVID-19 pandemic. 

LTN® Global, the industry leader in transformative media technology and video transport network solutions was the official interactive production partner of the Democratic National Convention (DNC), held this week in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. As the official interactive production partner, LTN’s solutions were used to combine audience participant feeds into a dynamic live video experience. The virtual event enabled participants to unite at one of the most critical times in American history.  The Democratic National Convention saw Democratic Party delegates formally nominate Joe Biden and Kamala Harris as candidates for the 2020 United States presidential election.

The South African entertainment industry unified en mass for their August 5^th #LightSARed ‘Code Red’ activation …  to shout out the critical state of the live entertainment industry and its support infrastructure, which has had no work, no cashflow – and no meaningful government support – for 5 months since mass gatherings were banned on March 15th due to the Coronavirus pandemic. Over 500 buildings, structures, monuments, venues, spaces and places all over the country were lit including the side of Cape Town’s most famous natural landmark Table Mountain. Robe moving lights were used on many of the installations, and the various action was coordinated by project teams in major cities including Johannesburg, Cape Town, Durban, Free State, Port Elizabeth, East London and Kimberley. Industry friends and colleagues from neighbouring Namibia also enthusiastically joined the action.

Martin Audio has been supporting the PLASA led #WeMakeEvents campaign which highlights the plight of the UK live events industry and the desperate need for additional Government support to this highly technical and specialised sector. The campaign culminated with a spectacular day of action with up to 5,000 people lining the banks and bridges of the River Thames to raise awareness of the crisis with politicians and the wider public.The live events industry was the first to be impacted by the global shutdown as a result of the pandemic and will be the last to return to work. It can only exist when large scale gatherings can be held safely, which is simply not possible until sometime next year and even then, the future is uncertain.

Yesterday’s #WeMakeEvents call to action focused on raising awareness for over a million professionals working in the technical side of the entertainment industry who have either lost, or are at imminent risk of losing their jobs - 600,000 of whom deliver live events, and around 70 per cent of the workforce are freelance. The government’s £1.57 billion investment to the cultural and arts institutions will not reach the key workers from the industry, and the imminent closure of the self-employed income support scheme at the end of the month further threatens their livelihood.

All of France marks the beginning of the modern French Nation each year on 14 July, with events taking place all over the country – but this year’s National Holiday was quite different due to the pandemic felt everywhere in the world. Lawo mixing consoles provided the highest possible audio quality for the traditional Concert de Paris taking place on the Champs du Mars at the foot of the Eiffel Tower – Lawo’s sixth successive year serving both the live and broadcast sound requirements.

Here are our demands of this open letter:

These are some first steps, essential to our chance of avoiding a climate- and ecological disaster​.

• Effective immediately, halt all investments in fossil fuel exploration and extraction, immediately end all fossil fuel subsidies and immediately and completely divest from fossil fuels.
• EU member states must advocate to make ecocide an international crime at the International Criminal Court.
• Include total emissions in all figures and targets, including consumption index, international aviation and shipping.
• Starting today – establish annual, binding carbon budgets based on the current best available science and the IPCC’s budget which gives us a 66% chance of limiting the global temperature rise to below 1.5 °C. They need to include the global aspect of equity, tipping points and feedback loops and shouldn’t depend on assumptions of possible future negative emissions technologies.
• Safeguard and protect democracy.
• Design climate policies that protect workers and the most vulnerable and reduce all forms of inequality: economic, racial and gender.
• Treat the climate- and ecological emergency like an emergency.

Düsseldorf’s 240m-tall Rheinturm tower was the setting for a sky-high laser projection and light show in June to promote Deutsche Telekom’s extended 5G network. The telecommunications company worked with German event management agency DO IT! to realise the show, and they in turn commissioned AO Creative to help conceptualise, design, supply the fixtures and technology, and execute the display.

At a special moment in the epidemic, SMT came up with a self-developed "cloud conference" system with the characteristics of high quality and high confidentiality, as another trump card of "technology innovation", using innovative technology to empower the conference forum and created a new model of the "Global Cloud-based Financial Feast" at the Lujiazui Forum and the "Cloud-based Conversation" on the Shanghai Mayor's International Entrepreneur Consultation Conference.

Dejero, an innovator in cloud-managed solutions that provide Emmy® award winning video transport and Internet connectivity while mobile or in remote locations, is providing a range of its Smart Blending Technology solutions to production company, Artistic Visual Studios (AVS) for its live production of Opal’s Walk; a petition march from Fort Worth, Texas to Washington D.C, led by 93 year old Opal Lee. Ms. Opal aims to gather one million signatures on her way to Congress today in order to make ‘Juneteenth’ (June 19^th) a national holiday to commemorate the abolition of slavery in the United States.

On Saturday at 3:22 p.m. EDT SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft with NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley on board successfully launched into orbit from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The first attempt on Wednesday, May 27 was scrubbed due to weather at Cape Canaveral.

The “May 5th Shopping Festival” is a brand-new large-scale consumption festival initiated in Shanghai. This live broadcast is the first large-scale event that held jointly by radio and television since the outbreak of Covid-19, its high-level specification, wide coverage, rich broadcast form, and complex system configuration could be defined as an all-round, full-process and full-link technical guarantee. In order to successfully complete broadcast work, and consider the related issues such as epidemic prevention and security. SMT deployed in advance and carefully planned. More than 200 crews worked together to create "Shanghai Shopping" brand.

Expo 2020 Dubai is gearing up to help shape a post-pandemic world and create a better future for all after a two-thirds majority of Bureau International des Expositions (BIE) Member States voted in favour of postponing the next World Expo by one year. The global mega event will now run from 1 October 2021 to 31 March 2022, a delay that allows all participants to safely navigate the impact of COVID-19, and allows the World Expo to focus on a collective desire for new thinking to identify solutions to some of the greatest challenges of our time.