Access All Areas Supplements The Next Generation Supplement | Page 7

NOVEMBER 2018 | THIRTY
The thirty
Jan Bogdanowicz, Voytek Dale Bowers, Bar Nation
It sounds so cliché but one of the things
I love most about my job is that no two
days are the same. One day I could be
in the office designing a lighting rig for a large
music festival and the next, I could be on-site
operating lights at a large conference for a global
brand.
Hawthorn works on a huge amount of exciting,
high-profile events so it’s really difficult to narrow
down my highlights. That said, one event that
does stand out for me was at the very beginning
of my career - the Coronation Festival Gala at
Buckingham Palace. Working as part of the
lighting team for Hawthorn we delivered a truly
spectacular show, built in just four days within the
grounds of the Palace.
Earlier this year I was also lucky enough to have
the opportunity to tour America as LD for OMD
and that was a huge highlight in my career so far.
Looking to the future, festivals and shows
are getting more and more visually spectacular
- pushing the boundaries of what’s possible
with technology. With the likes of Belgium’s
Tomorrowland and Romania’s Untold Festival
blazing ahead, I think we’ll continue to see the
rise in more extreme and high impact productions
filter down to the smaller events and festivals.” Over the past seven years I have
managed to travel all over the world to
produce, direct, film and edit videos
for events. From being attacked by monkeys in
Zambia whilst editing a video for an event - to
having our crew car stolen out in Mountainview,
California at an event for Google.
The career highlight for me was managing
a team at Google HQ in California. We were
given the task of creating a video experience for
six groups of top marketing executives. From first
concepts to the filming and then the final creation
of the video all in the space of two days. With
six editors and three camera operators helping
to create six videos, resources had to be managed
meticulously in order to give the clients a truly
memorable experience.
In order to provide attendees with unique
experiences, the events industry is ever changing.
In the corporate events side of things we are
constantly having to find new ways to impress our
clients and Augmented/Virtual Reality seems to
be popping up again and again. As the technology
gets more affordable clients are becoming
interested in how they can integrated these
techniques at their events and we are currently
working on ways in which this can be done. There are two standout highlights
of my career so far. I think the first
is curating and running the bar
operations at Houghton Festival. For those of
you who are unaware of Houghton, it is (as far
as I am aware) the only legal 24hr festival site in
the UK. The bars open at 4pm on a Thursday
and shut at 4am on the Monday. As you can
imagine, creating a rota, finding the staff as well
as the shear logistics of operating a 24hr site is
daunting, but safe to say, the crowd turned up, and
we absolutely smashed it, something that I will
always hold tight and proud.
Secondly, I think it has to be Aynhoe Backstage
at Wilderness festival. Aynhoe Park is a highly
prestigious venue in Oxfordshire, owned by
the creator of Fantasia nights and records (for
those 90s ravers). His house is an homage to the
craziness of eclectic nature of high society, ie
giraffes suspended by balloons from the ceilings,
full size Tintins, gold Ostrich feather lamps and
so on. I was tasked with recreating this venue
at a VIP site at Wilderness festival, utilising
naked Tipis, 3m mirror balls, a DJ set from
Sienna Miller, 8000 flowers and a Michelin Star
Chef, it has now embedded itself as a mainstay
of Wilderness and regularly gets over 2000
attendees.
I think the future can be summarised in two
words, immersion and automation. Technological
advances have rocketed in recent with the
360-degree cameras and immersive VR and AR.
I think we will see this brought to new light at the
testing grounds that are festivals.
Paul Bird, Hawthorn