Building a temporary gallery for Marcus's autumn arts weekend

The brief from Marcus

Marcus runs a small arts weekend in a converted warehouse outside the city. He rang us in late summer with a simple problem: three stages, a live stream for people who could not travel, and no room that looked anything like a control room. He had a budget, a floor plan drawn on the back of a poster and a worry that the stream would be the first thing to go wrong.

Our first conversation was short and practical. We asked how many cameras he imagined, where the power came from, who would be speaking on each stage and who needed to approve what went out. Marcus did not know the answers to half of these, and that was fine. Hannah, our production manager, wrote them down as questions to settle on a site visit rather than guesses to build on.

I was brought in to look at the gallery from the operator's side, because I would be cutting the show from it. That meant thinking about where I would sit, what I could see and how far I would be from the people I needed to talk to.

Walking the venue before drawing anything

Callum and I visited the warehouse on a grey weekday morning, when the building was cold and empty. We paced out the distances between the stages and looked for somewhere with a door that closed, a solid floor and mains power we could trust. A former loading office at the back, with one window onto the main hall, was the obvious candidate.

The room had problems. It was small, the ceiling was low and the only window faced the wrong way for seeing the largest stage. Callum measured the cable runs from each stage to the office and noted where they would cross walkways. A cable that crosses a path is a trip hazard and a failure waiting to happen, so every crossing was either rerouted or covered.

We also checked the sound. A gallery that shares walls with a stage hears the show through the plasterboard, which makes talkback hard to follow. We agreed on closed headsets and a quiet corner for the vision mixer position.

• Power supply and spare circuits
• Cable routes between stages and gallery
• Noise from the neighbouring hall
• Seating and sightlines for the operators

Drawing the plan and agreeing it on paper

Back in Durham, Callum turned the site notes into a camera plan and a signal path, a simple diagram showing every source, where it went and what could be swapped if something failed. It fitted on one page, which mattered. Marcus could read it, query it and sign it off without needing to know what a router was.

We put a small number of cameras on the main stage and one each on the two smaller ones, with a fixed wide shot as a safe fallback everywhere. The plan also listed who would be in the gallery, who would be on the floor and who held the final say on what was broadcast. That last line settled an argument before it began.

Marcus changed one thing: he wanted a camera in the audience. We agreed, moved the plan around it and sent a revised version in writing. Having the change recorded meant nobody was guessing on the day.

Building the gallery the day before

We arrived with the racks and monitors on the afternoon before doors opened. The first job was not equipment at all but making the room usable: moving a filing cabinet, taping down the floor, setting up a table at the right height and getting the lighting low enough to read the screens comfortably.

Racks went in next, then the cable runs, each one labelled at both ends. Labelling is dull work and nobody notices it when it is done properly. It is the reason a problem at nine in the evening takes two minutes to trace instead of twenty.

Daniel built the streaming chain on his own bench in the corner, with a second path ready in case the first dropped. By early evening the monitors showed pictures from every camera, and we left the building for a few hours before returning for a proper test.

• Label every cable at both ends
• Cover or reroute anything crossing a walkway
• Keep a spare path for the stream
• Leave the room tidy enough to work in the dark

Testing with the doors still closed

A test that only checks whether a picture appears is not much of a test. We ran a full rehearsal with Marcus's stage manager walking through a mock running order, so we could cut between cameras, bring in graphics and check that talkback reached the floor. Two things surfaced almost at once.

The first was a camera whose image lagged behind the others by a fraction of a second, noticeable only when cutting between shots. Callum traced it to a converter that had been set incorrectly and fixed it in minutes. The second was glare from a skylight that washed out one stage on the monitors, which the camera operator solved with a small change of position.

Neither would have been found if we had trusted the equipment simply because it powered on. By the time the doors opened the next morning, the gallery had been run properly once already.

What the weekend looked like from the chair

On the day, my job was the part the audience sees: following the performers, holding a shot long enough to mean something and cutting when the music asked for it. The gallery stayed calm because the hard decisions had been made a week earlier on paper and in the cold warehouse.

There were small surprises. A performer arrived early, a microphone failed on the second stage and a set ran twenty minutes over. None of them became a crisis, because every source had a fallback and everyone in the room knew who decided what.

Marcus spent much of the weekend on the floor, not in the gallery, which is a good sign. He checked the stream a few times on his phone, saw it was steady and went back to looking after his guests.

The lesson from Marcus's weekend is that a control room is mostly made before the show starts: a site visit, a plan on one page, labelled cables and a rehearsal that tries to break things. Equipment matters, but preparation decides the outcome. If you are planning a venue or festival gallery this winter, start with the room and the questions, and let the kit follow.