While many public companies have sedate meetings defined by their lack of production, Walmart pulls out all the stops: headliner entertainment, media heavy presentations, inspiring stories from the workforce and business-centric updates from the leadership team make for a busy morning for executives and a busy week for the production staff.

UVLD was thrilled to be part of the production this year, brought in by LEO Events for our 4th year on the project and our second working with rockstar executive producer David Kenyon.  As always, the show took place at the Bud Walton Arena on the University of Arkansas campus in Fayetteville.

The project is four shows: two nights of headliner entertainment, a mid-week associates meeting, and the Friday shareholder meeting. The Friday meeting draws 14,000 attendees and is viewed around the world as a live stream.

The talent this week was world-class, featuring Katy Perry, Three Doors Down, the Goo Goo Dolls, American Authors, Nick Jonas, Daughtry, Maxwell, Andy Grammar, and Jordan Smith. The shareholders meeting was hosted by James Corden, who was awesome, with the associates’ meeting hosted by Steve Harvey.

The set was designed by Star Kahn and had a ton of high-res LED panels to carry video content; however, our team was obsessed with the 150 magic panels which made up the backwall of the set. We used mBox studio to map video to the panels through the console, but we were also able to treat the panels as lighting fixtures to allow fat brush effects to dominate the picture.

Gregory Cohen was the lighting designer for the event, but – even more than usual – this was a team effort. Matt Webb programed with Matthew Piercy handling headliner programming and the nighttime concerts. Pete Campbell was the production electrician, assisted by Gerry Walls, Bill Moore,  Ryan Breneisen, Elliot Harney, and Josh Henderson.

It was an awesome project. and we all walked away proud. We feel, however, that we should mention some hardcore stats as some lighting fun facts as well.

 

The show took up 80 universes and was programmed on a GrandMA Full. We had 9 NPUs, and a metric crapload of cable. There were 300 moving lights consisting of Mac III, Vipers, Mythos, VL 3500 and Solaris Flares. There were many, many parcans doing audience lighting, and we’re pretty sure we returned the vast majority. The gear was provided by Upstaging, with Steve Wojda rocking it as our account rep.

There’s nothing like a big show, and this was not a small one. But whatever stress we felt was mitigated by being on a great team surrounded by great people. Kenyon’s gang from LEO was outstanding from top to bottom, and we only hope that UVLD lived up to the expectations being with such good people create. But you can judge for yourself, here are some pictures taken by the fantastic Lucy A Kennedy.