Drive Productions News

You are currently browsing the Drive Productions News weblog archives for January, 2008.

Archive for January, 2008

NEW MODEL ADVISER

Author: admin

22.01.2008

Another big success for Citywire’s main event

In January Drive produced the New Model Adviser event for Citywire for the third year, and this years event was an another all round huge success. The NMA is a multi-function event held over a single day and includes a daytime expo and conference followed by an evening banquet and bar reception.

For the daytime the main East hall and central concourse of Old Billingsgate became the exhibitors area housing fifty exhibitors and a bespoke food and drinks bar.

The West hall became the conference area complete with projection screens and the main stage.

As the daytime event came to a close the delegates left temporarily while the venue was transformed ready for the evening banquet and awards ceremony, with a reception area and bar.

We gave Old Billingsgate a different look to last years event using new colourways and some beautiful lighting design to create a cool and funky interior that retained a large measure of elegance. The look and feel was noticed and appreciated by the delegates and exhibitors, many of whom commented on it, especially contrasting it to other financial industry events lacking the same attention given to style and atmosphere.

The interior fittings included our unique chandelier (that also featured on Jamie Oliver’s Fowl Dinners TV programme) and light shades used to break up the overhead space in the banqueting area. The light shades were trumpet-shaped columns within a ring of fringe, and we used gobos on these to create an almost three-dimensional flower effect that was quite stunning.

EAT TO SAVE YOUR LIFE

Author: admin

21.01.2008

Jamie Oliver TV programmes for Channel 4 – set design & build

We were approached by Firefly to produce the set for two TV programmes aired on Channel 4 recently. The first was Jamies Fowl Dinners (see the previous posting).

The second was Eat To Save Your Life (originally morbidly entitled ‘Eat Yourself to Death’). For this we reconfigured parts of the set from Jamie’s Fowl Dinners filmed two days earlier at the same location.

This set was again composed of various zones, this time including a medical zone and testing areas. The audience members were also the ‘guinea pigs’ chosen to discover various suprising and sometimes shocking facts about their bodies relating to their diets.

Some quite amazing revelations emerged, such as the skinny guy who proved to be actually fatter than the fat guy in terms of his fat-to-muscle ratio.

The programme included a pre-filmed autopsy by the famous coroner Gunther von Hagens, who chopped away at a mouldy-looking obese corpse in his own cheerful way.

The programme was aired on 16th January.

JAMIE’S FOWL DINNERS

Author: admin

14.01.2008

Jamie Oliver TV programmes for Channel 4 – set design & build

We were approached by Firefly to produce the set for two TV programmes aired on Channel 4 recently.

The first was Jamie’s Fowl Dinners, an expose on the industrial poultry trade that generated a great deal of media interest and stirred a buzz of debate as Jamie’s work often does.

Our brief was to design a set with various zones including a dining area, live chicken areas and a slaughter house. The focus of the set was the ‘Jamies Kitchen’ stage including a working kitchen.

The set was designed to at first give live audience members the feel of entering a top-end dining room enclosed by red velvet drape. Once the audience members were seated the drapes fell away to reveal the various zones placed around the dining area. The production was run as a series of live presentations, audience interactions and pre-filmed cut-aways on plasma screens. The whole live studio element was captured in a single day.

The programme aired on Friday 11th January, when Ben and Jim from Drive watched it live at Jamie Oliver’s house, where they’d been invited to join other members of the production crew and indulge in a spot of (organic free range) chicken curry cooked by the man himself!

1001 CARPET ART

Author: admin

10.01.2008

1001 National carpet cleaning day

10th of January was National Carpet Cleaning Day (the date 10-01 happily coincides with the famous carpet cleaning brand) and as part of this important occasion we were asked by Frank PR to bring an artist on board to create some pieces of ‘Carpet Art’.

We commandeered a professional graffiti artist from the same stable as Banksy to produce four works, including a two metre wide London skyline, a Daily Star front cover and a portrait of Richard and Judy.

The art was made by first staining the carpet with coffee, leaving it to dry and then using 1001 cleaning products to cut through the stain to create an image. Some images were enhanced using food colouring applied through a stencil.