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FEATURE
National Sports Museum International sporting pilgrims have a new sacred site to add to their itinerary. Text: / Christopher Holder Photos: / John Gollings
If Sport is our nation’s true religion, then the MCG is Sport’s grandest cathedral. That being the case, somewhere in the presbytery… or in the left lower nave of the main transept… lurks Sport’s hi-tech multimedia shrine — the National Sports Museum. The museum is a great way for sports nuts to while away a good couple of hours. The interactive displays package some fantastic footage and other freshly-authored productions. Big screens, small screens, projectors, touchpanels, stump cams, combined screens, moving lights, theatrettes, flat panel directional speakers… and even the occasional sighting of a Pepper’s Ghost [more later]; it’s all packed into this ‘content rich’ funhouse. Mental Media was the AV consultant on the job, headed up by the very able Bruce Brown. Mental Media are museum specialists [see last issue for more on their work at the Australian War Memorial] and have considerable experience in not only spec’ing the hardware but authoring the creative elements. Possibly even more crucial, Mental Media knows a thing or two about tip-toeing through the minefield of committees, trustees and ‘other stakeholders’. I met Bruce and the museum’s AV technician James Power in the air-conditioned whir of the facility’s machine room.
The G Whiz AV: Given the museum is effectively a vast collection of AV devices, is it too much to hope that you were called in early on in the piece? Bruce Brown: I’m pleased to say, we were. Getting the multimedia consultant involved in those early stages makes everything more achievable and allows you to be more ambitious. We started working when the museum was a bare concrete shell. There were allowances made in the initial budgets to boost up or move air-conditioning ducts that were impinging on the space, and we were able to lay in all of our cabling, our power and data distribution before the exhibitions went in. So we were way ahead of the game. AV: And were you given much creative freedom? BB: We were given the opportunity to to work with CMD, the exhibition designers, to conceptualise the productions – what they should look like, and how they should fulfil the objectives. That doesn’t often happen to a multimedia production company, and in most cases the technical design and multimedia production are separate. We have expertise in both spheres, so we’re fortunate that we could go in at that base level and say, “we think it should look like this; this is the creative concept and this is how you do it technically.” That’s a big leap from [the normal scenario
of] someone going in and doing the creative consultancy part of it first, followed by the technical consultant tearing his hair out and being forced to make technical compromises. This Sporting Life AV: Bruce, can you take me through an example
of how one of the museum’s productions works? Bruce Brown: As an example, take the production in the ellipse as you enter, Our Sporting Culture [pictured above]. The display was produced in Watchout. The show sits on four computers which are routed through a KVM for monitoring. They also go out to DVI baluns then over Cat6 to DVI baluns in the roof next to four Projectiondesign F30s in the atrium. The projectors are also networked for powering on and off via the Medialon control system. Multi-channel audio is also part of the production which go out to Bose FreeSpace speakers via Dynacord 1415 multi-channel amplifiers in the machine room. AV: And is the geometry of the image in the eliptical atrium done by the projector or in software? BB: In software. The beauty of the Watchout system is you can have an uneven surface and ajust the geometry any way you like. For example, there’s window in the atrium, so we impose a blank onto the image to ensure we’re