THE TEAM:
- Kaarel Tamra – Project management and broadcast mix
- Kaur Kenk: monitor mix
- Karl-Elias Teder, Martin Hein, Robert Ruben on stage
This annual Estonian Republic anniversary concert show is one of the most watched live TV shows in Estonia. Every year there is a new art team with a new approach and narrative. It is a concert featuring many genres and collectives in Estonia, it is an audiovisual adventure to celebrate Estonian culture, address unity and some of the current topics.
Kaarel’s thoughts:
Project manager / Broadcast mixing engineer
To me this event is the crown jewel of live productions in Estonia. I feel extremely honoured to have been offered this job to execute the audio production side and deliver the broadcast mix to the national TV. It is one of the most watched shows in Estonia and also one of the most challanging productionwise. The input list consists of president speech mics, it is the most important presidental speech of the year.
The backstory is that there is Covid-19 and the only person in audience is the president – the hall is empty. So the TV and art director weren´t tied to show the concert from the hall audience perspective, but could play around with the idea of the show being all around you. That meant we didn´t have almost any room on the stage for our patch and monitor worlds and people. Monitor engineer Kaur ended up in the “opera box” overlooking the stage. Our stage technicians were hidden and had a TV-s installed where they could see what´s happening on the stage.
Sander Mölder was the musical director for the concert. He worked closely with the art director and the idea was to carry this concert out like a DJ set – songs and scenes mixed together seamlessly. You can imagine, that technically that means a lot of programming to have the scenes fade into each other perfectly. What added to the challange is that some material came from the TV truck as re-recorded video, some material from Sander´s Ableton Live, to which the performers had to play on. You´re thinking, yeah, what´s the problem, just give them click and In ears… Yeah, but when you have artists ranging from age 15 to 84, genres ranging from orchestral, choral, folk, rap, funk, electronic… Many of them are not used to clicks and cues…and In ears. Hell, we ran out of backup headphones, although we had like 10 of them :))
Also, the performers didn´t see the whole show happening on the stage (because it is not happening only on stage, some acts were in fouyers, some on the balcony), but had to be exactly on time with their song. Plus some parts of the show couldn´t be timed: actors acting, orchestral and choir pieces.. then you have a nice puzzle. You´re thinking, that fine, no problem, just give us three weeks to do it. The fun part is that we had one and a half days of rehearsals plus live concert right on top of that! Plus every part of the production saw this the first time and there was a lot of different interests at stake. For example how do you mic the choir, when it moves around, when your mics cannot be on the stage, because previous act needed the room for dancing, conductor says a big no to mic with close mics (not that you have the budget for that), the stage is very loud from gazillion lighting ventilators and the dancers from the previous act are making a loud noise with what sound like plastic bags when the choir is singing in pianissimo?
So i knew I had to have an amazing team to pull this off. And the Sonorus team was indeed amazing. Everyone was vigilante and responsible, thinking and solving problems by themselves and there were a lot of them. All in all the director came to thank us greatly, because we made it feel like a calm and relaxing place, everyone was loved on the stage. I´m very honoured to have been a part of our amazing team and this creative event.
After that production I feel like I have levelled up, like after a great enduring sporting event. This kind of challange has everything: all the different genres; all the different interests of deco, light, TV, art director, musical director; tight budget, extremely tight schedule, no room for error and a huge responsibility for National live Broadcast.