Late January this year I received first an email and then a call from Peter Harding, one of the directors of Hawthorn. We had never met before but Sarah Cox from d3 had recommended me for a job they had coming up in May, on which they were using d3 for the first time. I was in Milan at the time and on my return from the Milan job I was landing in London and driving in Newcastle where I stopped off at Cambridge and met Peter about the forthcoming job.
After a chat and a coffee and getting an overview of the project I was onboard to look after the d3 project & programming.
The conference is called Adobe Summit. this are an Annual meet up of businesses and users of Adobe products in excel. Fast forward to April I went to Hawthorn in Leicester to do some testing with the setup. We had 2 x d34x4 and a 14,000px X 1080px initial content canvas plus a load of LED pixel mapping. The tests went swimmingly well and following month we were in ExCel setting up for the gig.
Nick was head of video for the main room, Tony was looking after E2 switching, Sleepy Tom was tech video guy and I was there looking after the d3’s & programming. It was a really fun team and under the pressure of such a size gig we still had a laugh.
There was quite a bit of pixel mapping as well as the playback of the main opening continent and essentially “backgrounds” for when the speakers were presenting. Downstage center of the stage were a set of 2.5m high letters spelling SUMMIT, which we were projection mapping onto, and also pixel mapping just under 100 DMX fixtures inside the letters to light up the opaque sides matching the fide content on the front.
There were also some CMY fixtures above the SUMMIT letters, which were pointing down to colorize the shadow behind, as we couldn’t hit that part of the screen with projection because of the letters. 
And in addition on site I pixel mapped 22 Ayton blades that were running along the top of the set. After a few hours of tweaking and working with the lighting department we were all mapped and ready.
New content came when the client turned up and we got that in the system and basically went straight into rehearsals. It was a mixture of a really fast setup, then parts of waiting around allot then moments of being really busy. I’d never worked for Hawthorn before and dint realize how big the company was and how big this gig was until I arrived at ExCel for the first day. The entire of the conference center was taken over for the event with so much technical kit installed!
After rehearsals and 2 days of shows it was over, It was a great gig to be part of and meet some new friends.