 Hi, I'm Mitch Lockulane and welcome to Riedel's Highlight Series. We've been taking a deep dive into some principal roles within the arts and theatre industries recently and in today's episodes we will focus on the technical design components of theatres and venues. We had the immense pleasure to co-host this design episode with none other than industry expert Oliver Taylor from the Adelaide Festival Centre. Thanks for joining us today Oli. I really appreciate you coming and joining us on this highlight series that we are going through. Would you be able to give us a little bit of a background or a brief into your role at the Adelaide Festival Centre? Sure. So here at the Adelaide Festival Centre I am employed as an audio engineer however my role encompasses far more than that. So I look after the audio network infrastructure, video systems including our media net and the IP TV we use here, comms both in terms of in-house and to some extent front of house. I also look after the recording so we're in our studio at the moment. We also manage all of that. I also look after planning the infrastructure of the building in terms of production. So the fibre, the coax, audio lines, the whole lot. So that's kind of a very brief overview of what I do here. Yeah wow it's a very big job that you've got going there and you mentioned you look after a lot of the infrastructure there so what type of thought process do you go through when looking at designing the infrastructure around such a state-of-the-art venue like the Adelaide Festival Centre? So this is not a quick process. You really need to spend a lot of time talking to your co-workers and other stakeholders and understand what they actually want when they come into a venue. So there's no point putting in a whole bunch of proprietary tie lines and things like that that no one is going to use and may not work with equipment that everyone else is looking at purchasing. So definitely talking to co-workers to find out what do you guys want to be able to do? What would make your life easier? What would streamline this process? Talking to the touring musicals and things and go if we had this would it help you? Things like that. And it seems like there's a lot of growth there. So have you seen a lot of growth throughout the South Australian events, theatre and performance industry over the last few years? And where do you think you'll see that growth move to? Up until the start of this year, yes. It has been shows have been getting bigger, longer running seasons. And in terms of actual production quality, things have been going up and up and up, which means people want more, more, more, more fibre, more power. The whole whiz bang, they want everything. Yeah, sure. No, that's great. And it is good to hear that a lot of people are, you know, wanting to come to the Festival Centre in order to be able to use the facilities. And that throws up, I guess, the question of what type of challenges you've seen with this growth and with having such a state of the art facility that have emerged from trying or have come out of what you've built and obviously what technologies have helped you with that challenge? So our biggest issue has been what we support our local arts companies. So yes, our state theatre company and state opera. The problem we've had in the last probably eight years is the demise of analog video and the opera when it comes to conductors like the lowest latency possible when it comes to any fallback on stage, visual fallback for the singers. So we have spent probably six years planning for the switchover from analog to digital because it's impossible to get an analog monitor nowadays. And every time, obviously, you convert from digital to analog, either way, you induce latency. So that's probably been our biggest and most expensive challenge to resolve. In March this year, we had our first switchover to digital. The digital system and it has been flawless. No one mentioned any latency, which is usually unheard of when you start putting LCD monitors out. So that's probably been one of our major issues that has been solved by latest in the latest in SDI technology, I guess. Yeah, sure. And so obviously there, you know, the center is quite a large center. Can you can you give us a bit of a background into into the center and what you look after? So we have four venues here at the Adelaide Center. There's three within the main building, the Festival Theatre, 2000 seat auditorium. We have a playhouse, which is about 600 to 900, depending on configuration. Then we have a little space theater, which is between 100 and 300, depending on your configuration on that down the road. We have just reopened Her Majesty's Theatre, a brand new build. So that holds around 1800 people. So those are our main venues. And then once we go into things like the Adelaide Cabaret Festival, we expand out to something like 12 venues. So we we turn anything into a venue. We turn rehearsal rooms into venues. We turn little, you know, closets basically. So the challenges in terms of making all of these things work, make sure everyone can talk to each other and things like that. It's quite challenging. Yeah, definitely. And I mean, you know, communications and I think I said this before, but communications is obviously something that's quite essential within this. And and so from your perspective, what what is, I guess, the greatest initiative that you put forward in terms of not only just the visual side, but also the communications within the space. We bought way more gear than we thought we'd need. That was kind of always been our ethos, which is if you need 10 by 20, which has proved to be a good choice now that everyone has had a taste of the digital lifestyle, everyone wants more, more, more. So that's probably that the best thing we did was purchase a ridiculous amount of panels, a ridiculous amount of belt packs. And there's still times where we get very low on numbers. I think in the main house we had 20. Twenty six WB2s cranking for one show. So yeah, we bought a lot more than we thought we'd need. It turned out to still not be enough. Yeah, yeah. OK. And certainly, when you're when you're looking at it, is there a real difference between wireless communication solutions and wide communication solutions? Or is it something that's so integrated now that it doesn't really matter? So integrated. Now, everyone, we find now that stage managers pretty much exclusively run on wireless comms now, as opposed to previously, you'd always have them on a hard, wide pack at the desk and with a long cable for redundancy. Now, we've had so few issues with our comm system on wireless that they just pretty much call most of the shows and rehearsals on wireless. Oh, wow, that's great. Especially now that we've integrated our paging system into the artist frames. They love the fact that they can call cast crew from anywhere in the building, really. So they can be down in the green room with their wireless pack and just call everyone on stage given their 30 minutes or whatever. So they love that. Yeah, nice. And do you do a lot of distribution between the different event spaces? So, I mean, obviously, that when you're talking about the cabaret festival, there's a lot of event spaces that you have to make out of basically, you know, nothing in cupboard spaces and so forth like you were talking about. Do you have a need for a lot of distribution and transport around there that you need to be able to assist everyone that's that's coordinating those spaces? Yes. So during those times, your dressing room may not be anywhere near your actual venue, so the stage managers have to go and collect you because they can't call you. So if the stage managers to be able to walk from one side of the building to the other and still be in communications with the venue as is life changing for them. Previously, people were, you know, as soon as you walked more than a couple hundred meters from your venue. That's it. You had no no communications back. So in that regard, it's made life so much easier for everyone else. I mean, a crew, they can go to the other side of the building to the green room get dinner, you know, and still be in communications as if they're in their venue. So, yeah, that is probably the biggest changer here. Yeah, wow, that's fantastic. All right, Ollie, thank you so much for your time. It's been great having you on and best of luck for the next year at the festival center. Thank you very much.