It’s all go for The PA People
Published: ASIA
AUSTRALIA: The PA people has been busy these past few months, racking up a whole host of installations at major events around Australia. Beginning the year quite literally with a bang, the company weas involved in Sydney’s New Year Eve celebrations, and has since provided solutions at the Olympic Park Tennis Centre for the APIA international tournament. Planning is also now currently underway for the Australian Grand Prix, where the company has been tasked with providing over 500 track side speakers.
‘It’s certainly been a crazy few months,’ Matt Kirby, manager of event communications at The PA People, commented ‘Our Event Comms team have been hard at work over the summer months delivering on some of Australia’s most significant cultural, civic and sporting events and I’m proud to say our teams performed beyond expectations.’
For the NYE celebrations, a fully networked communications system that spanned all the major event sites and operational control centres was required. The system installed by the team featured wired matrix communications; full duplex wireless communications; as well as timecode, FireoneTM and playback distribution. This was all complemented by the roll-out of The PA People's new fully integrated digital two-way radio fleet for logistics and production staff.
The company then launched straight into its involvement with the APIA International tournament, where it provided distributed audio systems throughout the court infrastructure at the Olympic Park Tennis Centre.
‘It’s indicative of the broad range of services we provide when one minute we are assisting the most iconic New Years Eve event in the world, and the next we are supporting elite sporting events such as the tennis,’ said Mr Kirby.
Other significant events throughout January and February saw the company involved with audio systems for the Australian Boardriders Battle, held at Cronulla Beach, as well as communication systems for the Australia Day Celebrations at Darling Harbour, produced by Andrew Walsh from Accolade.
February also saw The PA People travel south to provide expertise to the St Kilda Festival in Victoria. As one of Australia’s oldest and much loved street festivals, that attracts crowds of over 300,000 people in a single day, the need for reliable event communications was critical to its success.
‘We provide a significant number of systems for this event, that allows all the stakeholders including essential services and production staff, the ability to monitor activities in real-time around the entire event site. This includes a fully networked CCTV system, environment and noise monitoring using our SPLnet product, wired matrix communications and integrated two way radio communications to over 200 event staff,’ said Mr Kirby. ‘The team did a great job in very challenging circumstances given the 40-degree heat and extremely high winds that prevailed throughout the day.’
Straight off the success of this event, The PA People are now deeply entrenched in planning for the installation of the Formula 1 Australian Grand Prix in Melbourne, an event that again combines a number of the company’s services into an overall solution. Central to this involvement is the installation of over 500 trackside speakers, race control monitoring, and UPS systems, as well as a number of stand-alone PA systems for external activities that happen around the track.
‘This event is significant for us both in profile and scale,’ Mr Kirby commented. ‘The installation takes place over many weeks and there is little left to chance in either our planning or delivery.’