Live to your Living Room has won £10,000 of funding from the new CreaTech Frontiers programme, which we will use to revolutionise our gig visuals.
CreaTech Frontiers is a five-year project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and led by Birmingham City University. Its goal is to create a thriving creative technology (CreaTech) sector in the West Midlands through grant funding, internships, and apprenticeships.
The organisation launched its first round of funding in June this year, offering grants to SMEs involved within the region’s creative industries sector, allowing them to carry out detailed research and development (R&D).
After a very competitive application process, Live to your Living Room was awarded support to develop a plug-and-play, financially sound, and environmentally sustainable solution for remote vision mixing.
‘Revolutionising’ how we put on gigs
Pete Ord, Technical Director at Live to your Living Room said: “Our shows offer professionally mixed audio that’s optimised for our online audience – we send audio equipment to the artists, which our engineers then access remotely to mix over Zoom.
“As part of our funding bid, we wanted to investigate how we could do a similar thing with our visuals. This would mean we could improve the quality of our broadcasts without having to send a producer and camera crew to each venue.
“While the software to do this does exist, it’s in its infancy, and nobody else really uses it this way. With the funding, we’re planning to develop a plug-and-play solution for remote vision mixing, which we can easily send out to artists and venues. This will massively improve the production values of our events, but without increasing our carbon footprint.”
As part of the award package, we will also have access to top of the range educational and academic facilities, alongside expert guidance from professors and technicians.
Pete is highly optimistic about the project and the future: “Not only will this benefit how we put on gigs as an organisation, but there’s also significant potential for it to help the wider arts sector in the long-term, revolutionising audio-visual practices whilst keeping costs right down.
“Grassroots venues will be able to put on high-quality broadcasts for much less money, and independent artists, particularly those with disabilities, will be able to deliver professional-quality shows from their own homes without having to worry about the technical setup.
“It’s all incredibly exciting, and we’re looking forward to collaborating with the CreaTech Frontiers mentors and putting our ideas into action.”