Conservative Party Headquarters

General Election coming up?  You’re going to need some serious Audio Visual & Communication equipment to get your message across. 

Now more than ever, governments and political parties need to be monitoring and responding to global news.  So when a political party announces that it’s a “21st-centry party”, it had better be plugged into the media, not least literally.  So, when the Conservative Party moved from its long-time headquarters in Smith Square last year to new London offices in Victoria Street, it took the opportunity to completely overhaul its AV systems. 

Planning and Design

Interior Designers Metro turned to Smartcomm to handle all the audio visual and lighting requirements.

“The Conservative Party had a lot of ideas about what they wanted to do and the technology they wanted to put in,” says Mark Allen, Smartcomm’s Systems Designer on the project.

Brand new kit was installed in the press room and the media monitoring room on the second floor, whilst the TV reception and signal distribution kit went into a Comms room on the third floor, and a boardroom on the fourth floor was fitted out with some AMX control, a P50XCA30ES 50 inch plasma display from Fujitsu, six DSi455 in-ceiling speakers from Boston Acoustics and a Samsung SV-DVD 440 DVD/VCR combi playback unit.

In addition to the flat screen TVs in the media monitoring room, Smartcomm has also installed 60 wall-mounted 28inch CRT TVs in the building, spread equally across the three floors used by the party, in order to give all the staff ready access to the available TV channels.  Smartcomm installed four rackmounted PRO-1000 16x16 video, audio and IR switching units from Scion Technology in the Comms room along with pay TV boxes.  The PRO-1000 distributes the video and audio signals over CAT-5 around the building.

 

Press Room

The Press room is the centrepiece of the project, bringing together sophisticated audio, video and lighting technology in order to deliver a slick stylish, modern environment within which the Party can convene the press for conferences and briefings.

For the broadcasters coming in with their cameras, suitable cabling is run out of the room to the  broadcast vans parked outside.

 

“People like Sky can come in with their cameras and plug straight in” says Mark Allen, “We didn’t get involved in running the TV cables out, but the whole design of the stage and the screens, the size and brightness of the screens and the lighting all took into account the broadcast requirement.”

 

Panoramic 30ft Display Screens

In order to maximise the presentational impact and flexibility of the visuals, Smartcomm installed a panoramic 30ft-wide screen display consisting of three angled 10ft by 8ft projection screens as a backdrop to those on stage.  Smartcomm chose three Epson EMP-8300 networkable LCD projectors to provide rear projection onto the screens, backed up by an array of Analog Way image processing, switching and splitting technology to maximise the flexibility of image distribution. 

A video or computer image can be sent to each of the three screens or a single image can be displayed over the width of all three, a task handled by an Analog Way Smart Fade 215A image processor.  “It knows what part of the image to send to what projector and it does all the edge blending,” says Mark Allen.

 

Sound

A Sennheisser 4-channel radio mic system together with MD-425 desk mics were used to pick up the voices of the speakers.  To create and even spread of sound around the room, Smartcomm installed four JBL Control-25 monitors along with 12 control-24CT ceiling speakers that are flown from the lighting rig. 

A Soundcraft Ghost LE32 32-channel desk handles all the sound mixing requirements.  The Ghost desk and an LSC lighting maXim 96 fader lighting control console are located in a control booth at the back of the press room.