EPSON

Broadcast Management Group was contracted to provide live production services, technical management, production staffing, and creative services for Epson’s “Swimming in Ink” event in Times Square. The 8-hour live production served as a promotional event for a new line of Epson printers. The event featured a custom-built, 17,000 gallon swimming tank and live performances by the U.S. women’s synchronized swimming team.

A live production of this magnitude required extensive pre-production planning and support. Broadcast Management Group partnered with iDEKO Productions on the “Swimming in Ink” event, who provided all permitting, staging, and power for the event along with fabrication and delivery of the custom-built tank. With iDEKO handling all of the event logistics, Broadcast Management Group focused on the live production and creative services for “Swimming in Ink”. This entailed engineering the technical solutions to meet the needs of the project, creating all show graphics, creating graphics and still content for 11 video billboards in Times Square, and creating a full run-of-show for the 8-hour live production.

“Swimming In Ink” took place in the heart of Times Square, which is a very congested and challenging live production environment. Plaza rentals in Times Square are based on a 24-hour booking – meaning you get the space at 12:01am and have to be out at 11:59pm. Because the budget did not allow for a multi-day plaza booking, all setup, production, and strike had to take place in one day. This meant and extremely early call time for all crew and an 18-hour production day. About 6 days before the live production, we were informed by the NYPD that the location of our production vehicles needs to be moved due to Pope Francis’ visit to New York City. The only available parking location had parking meters that could not be removed, which prevented us from being able to pop out the expansion on our production truck. This meant, only 6 days before the event, we had to find a smaller production truck that could technically accommodate the production and complete re-engineer our approach.

“Swimming In Ink” was shot using 11 cameras – 3 handhelds, 1 hard camera, 1 technojib, and 6 POVs. Broadcast Management Group supplied a field correspondent and ENG crew to conduct live and live-to-tape interviews with Epson VIPs and event attendees throughout the day. Broadcast Management Group also supplied event photographers and behind the scenes videographers to capture the full scope and magnitude of the live event. In addition, we produced several satellite media tours with stations around the country during the event.