As thousands of people packed the streets of Sydney on Sunday June 6 for the annual Procession of the Blessed Sacrament, an event that dates back to 1247, Epic Event Support designed a software product ensuring seameless celebration.

The Procession as it makes its way down
Sydney’s Macquarie Street

The Procession through the city, a celebration of the Feast of Corpus Christi, has been successfully managed by Blue Fish Events since 2003 entrusted by the Catholic Archdiocese of Sydney.

Event coordinator Chaline Taylor, Event said that while the event seems like a straightforward street parade it does have its unique challenges.

“This is an important event in the Church calendar, it is essentially a church service on the move. That means delivering the logistics of a street parade while keeping the sombre and holy experience that you would find inside a cathedral,” she said.

A key challenge is to provide synchronised audio along the route for the soundtrack of hymns and prayers. This had previously been achieved through a narrow-band FM broadcast licence, however the frequent signal dropouts due to interference through the city had become unacceptable to the client. The event managers turned to Epic Event Support for a new solution.

“With our experience in live theatre and events we were able to design a software product, named Ivory, that was robust enough to use in an outdoor, high-pressure environment,” said Epic Event Services’ technology and events manager, Josh Lemon. “The event was able to cut down on staff, one person could remotely trigger all the systems with the knowledge that audio would be delivered in synch across the entire route.”

Audio systems were mounted onto golf carts by Coda Audio Services. Epic Event Support provided a laptop to generate the high-quality, stereo soundtrack locally in each cart, ensuring no dropouts or signal interference and used wireless networking to send a synchronised trigger to each system.

The audio systems were mounted into the carts
to allow for seamless, synchronised sound

“Ivory is infinitely scalable, you could provide synchronised audio and messaging to thousands of locations without the need to run cable between systems. It also enables the event manager to play tracks in any order and even insert emergency audio messages if required,” Lemon explained. “Procession was our first opportunity to use the system and the client was very happy with the result. We look forward to using Ivory to assist other events in the future.”

Epic Event Support provides specialist support services to event managers and the entertainment industry. For more information click here.