Wella ITVA 2010, Paris

Tonight was the 2010 Wella International Trend Vision Awards show at Halle Freyssinet, Paris which saw competitors and guests from all over the world show off and discuss the big new hairstyles and colours for the next 12 months. The event was produced by Jack Morton Worldwide who brought together a huge number of suppliers to create a very successful show.

The event was built in three ‘acts’, the first being a demonstration of Wella’s big new trends of 2011, ‘Passionista’, ‘Lumina’, ‘Glamazon’ and ‘Polaris’. The afternoon act consisted of two competitions, ‘Young Talent’ and ‘Colour’, both of which are very prestigious awards to receive and can lead to great things for the winners.

In the evening, the guests and competitors were treated to dinner and entertainment from Diversity, The Noisettes and Soul Symphony.

The day show catwalk area consisted of 4x HD side screens and one 16m x 7m edge blended main screen. The main screen at the back of the catwalk had a revolving box at it’s lower centre to allow four different apertures for the models to emerge from, each matching the style of the trend. In the afternoon, this box was opened up to allow a DJ to perform for the competitions.

XL Video were brought in to realise the video requirements on site, including fixed, jib and mobile cameras, LED screen, projection and control systems.

The trend content was designed and created by Knifedge with additional stings and animated name straps created by Jamie at JSCGI, all managed by Adam from JMW London and Justine Catterall.

James was tasked to turn the mass of video files, images and audio tracks into a programmed live show using Catalyst. Part of this process was done at XL Video’s office in Hemel Hempstead to save time on site, however due to the delivery schedule of the video content lots more had to be done in Paris meaning some long days and late nights. Being involved from an early stage in meetings at Jack Morton’s office in London and a wealth of emails and conference calls meant that James could ensure content was delivered in a way to work smoothly in Catalyst and make best use of the projection media.

Basic Monkey supplied a Jands Vista S3 system to control the 4x XL Catalyst systems and also our own new 12 core Catalyst system for surround audio playback and video processing. The system involved signal routing which allowed country and studio names to be keyed onto the live webcast at the same time as flags were displayed on the main screen. Live camera feeds were fed into Catalyst to be output to the side screens when not used as part of the trend video intros.

The show involved heavy use of alpha channel transparency to allow builds rather than fades, this involved some creative programming which was made readily achievable thanks to the the Jands Vista software.

Next years show is in New York and despite being pretty tired after the week, James is hoping to be involved again next year.

Many thanks to Nina Dunn from Knifedge who took the photos during the show (I was busy pressing the button in video city!).