Industry News

Headline	Visions Celebrates With Nelson Mandela
Article	Outside Broadcast company to provide host broadcast facilities to the Nelson Mandela 90th Birthday Concert NEP Visions, the largest independent outside broadcast company in the UK and one of the largest in Europe has been selected by Serpent Productions to deliver host broadcast services for the Nelson Mandela 90th Birthday concert in Hyde Park. Visions will also be providing OB facilities for terrestrial broadcaster ITV and American channel VH1. The concert which will be held in Hyde Park on Friday 27 June will feature big name artists including Queen, Annie Lennox, Simple Minds, Leona Lewis, the Sugababes, Dame Shirley Bassey and Razorlight amongst others. NEP Visions were selected to provide host broadcast facilities for the concert by Serpent Productions and will provide a complete OB solution including a HD production unit covering 20 cameras, graphics facilities and surround sound recording in Dolby 5.1. Working in partnership with Onsite, Visions will also house all the 5.1 HD Edit facilities in their multipurpose production unit Voyager including 3 HD Avid Adrenaline Edit Suites allowing material to be edited and sent straight to air from the site. Visions will also be working again with the Vortex ariel camera mount which lifts a camera from ground level to 30 feet in just 15 seconds providing stunning shots of the stage and crowd. London will host three days of birthday celebrations for Nelson Mandela which will culminate in the concert for an audience of 46,664 guests, which was Nelson Mandela’s prison number during his incarceration and is the name of his global HIV AIDS awareness campaign. Specially invited guests at the concert will include President Bill Clinton, Prime Minister Gordon Brown, Will Smith, Ms Oprah Winfrey, Robert de Niro, Forest Whitaker and Lewis Hamilton. The event will be being beamed around the world, as well as being broadcast live on ITV. Susan Bourne, unit manager of the event adds, “There are usually a couple of major one-off music events each summer, but this year the Nelson Mandela concert is probably the highest profile. It’s a great job for us to work on and we’re especially pleased to be working with David Mallet, one of the best known directors in the music business. NEP Visions has the depth and strength of experience to provide all these facilities for huge, immensely complicated, international events. In addition to the Nelson Mandela concert which is certainly on a par with last years Live Earth concert if not bigger, we will also be providing comprehensive OB solutions for 4 different customers at Wimbledon Tennis Championships at the same time. Following on from the coverage of the Nelson Mandela celebration Visions will also be providing host broadcast services on behalf of Live Nation for the Hard Rock Calling festival to be held in Hyde Park on Saturday 28 June and Sunday 29 June. The festival will include performances from Eric Clapton, The Police, Sheryl Crow and KT Tunstall. “NEP Visions has a long history of working on large scale, multi-deliverable music events, including Live 8 and the major festivals like Glastonbury over the years plus we’ve worked on some of the largest concerts of this year including the Foo Fighters at Wembley Stadium, so our experience has put us in a great position to cover these two major events in Hyde Park,” concludes Bourne.
Company	Visions
Date Published	4/7/2008