Maxedia Ease for Northwestern Mutual Financial Network Annual Meeting

Northwestern Mutual Financial Network (NMFN), a large financial services company, held its annual agents convention in Milwaukee in July 2005. With an attendance of approximately 10,000, these meetings are no small matter.

NMFN’s annual meetings usually incorporate a somewhat conservative mix of standard stage and video screens, but this year it was decided to bring a higher level of technology into the show. Olivier Ilisca, co-owner of Center Stage Productions (CSP) of South Holland, Illinois, was called upon to provide the lighting and visual design and turned to a Martin package that included the Maxedia Digital Media Composer, Maxxyz lighting console, MAC 2000 Profiles, MAC 2000 Performance and MAC 600 washlights. MAC supply was by Upstaging, Inc.

“We had done a similar design for another client and at the time I used two Catalyst media servers,” Olivier commented. “They worked for what we were doing but took quite a lot of time to program and organize. I then decided to use Maxedia for its ease of programming and operations. I knew that we didn’t have a lot of pre-programming time and that the clients would be bringing a lot of content onsite.

“One of the Maxedia’s took care of the LED wall upstage and the other Maxedia handled the Mipix header above. Both had to be in sync and were therefore controlled by a Martin Maxxyz console. Aside from the usual texture behind the speakers and the moving effects behind the entertainment, the client asked that we handle a lot of content - logos, names, awards categories, specific messages, etc.

“That made the choice for Maxedia very easy, since I needed maximum flexibility onsite without the advantage of pre-programming ahead of time. Aside from the included content included in the servers, we brought along an external hard drive full of content from our personal content to things like ‘digital juice’ and more. We also made a number of custom gobos, such as company logo and name, and loaded them in the MAC 2000 to complement the branding of the event.

“The ease and rapidity of layering effects and text files was a no-brainer. I was able to add on the fly, categories of awards on the header and names of winners on the wall....all very seamless and quite easily. Actually we ended up complementing the main contents on the main screens with additional information. The clients were feeding me ‘png’ files with content the morning of the show and it was very easy to add them into the cueing. At the end of the show, the Beach Boys performed and we handled the visuals for them as well….it was very easy to just follow along and basically decide on the fly what to do to complement their lighting.

“All in all the show was a success and I was very happy with the systems. They performed perfectly and as predicted. I am a big fan of the systems and will never look back. As the world of lighting transforms itself, Maxedia will be part of my design for years to come. With the recent addition of software, more tricks and effects, I look forward to my next project using Maxedia, probably for the Auto Show in Detroit this winter.”

Produced by Bud Melto Williams Gerard Productions
Scenic design by Terry McClellan Scenographix
Technical Direction by Bruce Holland CSP
Lighting and Visual Designer Olivier Ilisca, CSP
Lighting Programmer John Marovich, CSP
Maxedia Programmer Olivier Ilisca, CSP
Assistant Maxedia Programmer Troy Fujimura, CSP
Master Electrician Tyler Roach, Upstaging
LED Tech Dave Panscik, Nocturne prod.