In September 2016, GoPro launched five of their most progressive products yet, the Hero 5 Black camera, Hero 5 Session, Karma drone, Quik mobile editing software, and their GoPro Plus Cloud service. Taking over the former Olympic venue at Squaw Valley in Tahoe, CA, GoPro wanted to integrate immersive LED screens, broadcast content and live stage production to create an event that truly conveyed the impressive scope and capabilities of their new offerings. Britelite teamed up with Pen&Public to create custom designed assets and a one of a kind custom high resolution playback system along with providing live content and show direction.
MY ROLE
For this project, I created a custom playback system using Touchdesigner to run the content on the stage behind the presenter. Due to the high-profile nature of the event, I configured everything to run on 2 redundant playback computers which would both be outputting the exact same content at the same time. The video outputs from these systems were run through A/B hdmi switchers, allowing us to switch from the primary system to the backup system within 1 second if anything went wrong with the primary system.
THE RESULT
The award winning event was hugely successful for GoPro and generated an unprecedented amount of social shares, national press coverage, and more than 550,000 live viewers on Facebook Live. A reporter from BBC at the event called it “Far and away the best product presentation I have ever seen. As he [Nick Woodman] unveiled it to his audience – a mixture of GoPro staff, athletes and journalists – the crowd’s whoops made the atmosphere at the last Apple launch seem like a genteel afternoon of county cricket.”
