Event name: Tamworth Country Music Festival
Client: Tamworth Regional Council and the Country Music Association of Australia (CMAA)
Date of event: 17-26 January 2019
Location: Tamworth Regional Entertainment Centre, NSW
Services provided:
- Production design and management
- Staging
- Event lighting
- Video production
- Live production
Project objectives: To successfully showcase Australia’s elite country music talent on a global stage.
For over 15 years HF Event Services has been proudly working in collaboration with organisers of the Tamworth Country Music Festival to showcase Australia’s country music talent on a global stage. A 10-day event with over 2000 performances, the Tamworth Country Music Festival is also home to the coveted Golden Guitar Awards.
To bring it all to life, every year HF Event Services works tirelessly with Tamworth Regional Council and numerous stakeholders to understand all the intricacies pertaining to the festival.
The planning, scoping and design phase commences in the September prior to the event, from there, HF Event Services starts booking crew, transport, accommodation, stage sets and audio-visual equipment, as well as commences the overarching audio-visual creative and project plan.
In November prior to the main event, the HF Event Services team provided the live production solution for the Golden Guitar Nominee Announcement Ceremony – held at the ABC Studios. From the provision of the stage set, camera crew and webcast functions – through to all creative audio-visual elements – this project marked the true beginning of what the project was to evolve into come January.
For the 2019 awards, HF Event Services designed the lighting and LED screen displays to establish an entirely new visual experience, as well as curated, developed and produced the animated graphics and visual awards package.
This work was vital, as for the first time in the event’s history, national broadcaster ABC was live streaming 90-minutes of the Golden Guitar Awards across the nation. This required the precise production management skills of HF Event Services to ensure an eight-man live camera crew, and lighting and recording technicians, were working seamlessly together to deliver flawless coverage, not just of what was happening on stage, but also the redirection to capture live shots of winners and their speeches.
Prior to the Golden Guitar Awards evening, the venue is transformed into the Country Theatre catering for smaller 2000 seat performances. The change over to the awards stage takes place on Thursday night after Lee Kernaghan’s performance; there was a tight 12-hour timeframe, requiring 30 ground crew to erect, setup and test the required equipment and staging ready for rehearsals Friday morning.
The outcome:
All-in-all another fantastic event with over 1 million man-hours attributed to the project in its entirety. With 10,000 attendees through the venue across the event’s ten days, through to the number of viewers tuning it to watch the Awards on the ABC – the 2019 Tamworth Country Music Festival broke all records.
