Last
March at CinemaCon in Las Vegas, one of the highlights of the cinema industry’s
largest annual trade event was a screening of Disney’s upcoming blockbuster,
“Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales”, the latest in the Pirates
franchise. Each year, the aptly-named 4,000 seat Colosseum at Caesars Palace is
transformed into the world’s largest movie theatre, a colossal joint effort
between QSC, Dolby, Boston Light and Sound and the Colosseum technical crew.
Disney
executives were so thrilled with the outcome that they invited QSC and Dolby to
Shanghai to do it again – this time for the worldwide premiere of the film in
the Grand Theatre at the Shanghai Disney Resort.
Like the
Colosseum at Caesar’s, the Grand Theatre was not originally designed to be a
movie theatre; it is normally used for theatrical stage productions. At over
1,000 seats, it’s larger than a typical cinema, so the QSC technical crew
realized that a slightly scaled down version of the same system used in the
Colosseum would produce optimal results. The Left, Center, and Right screen
channels were delivered by three “hangs” consisting of eight QSC WL2102w line arrays with two WL218-sw subwoofers suspended behind the screen. Along the stage
floor at bottom of the screen, eight SB-7218 subwoofers reproduced the extended low frequency audio.
Since the soundtrack featured Dolby Atmos immersive audio, thirteen QSC SR-1590 coaxial surround loudspeakers were installed on the side
and rear walls, with another ten SR-1590s attached to two flown truss sections
for overhead immersive coverage. All of the QSC loudspeakers were powered by
QSC DPA-Q Series 4-channel network amplifiers, and controlled and monitored
on a network via a Q-SYS Core 500i processor.
QSC’s Jon
Graves, Paul Brink, and Christian “Cookie” Cook led a team of professionals
from Disney, Prime Connections Inc. (QSC’s distributor in Beijing), and Dolby
to accomplish the monumental feat. Similar to the Colosseum transformation, the
effort in Shanghai involved temporarily dismantling the installed “house”
system, installing the QSC audio and Dolby Cinema projection systems, and then
dismantling it. This time, it all had to happen in a matter of just three days.
“Everyone
who attended was impressed with the superior quality of the sound and image
they experienced during the screening of the film,” says Kevin Rosenberger,
Director of Projection Engineering, Disney Digital Studio Services. “What they
won\’t ever know is how we came together as a team—how each person looked out
for their discipline, and then how they looked out for the man standing next to
them.”
The $320
million Jerry Bruckheimer production stars Johnny Depp, Geoffrey Rush, Javier
Bardem, Keira Knightley, Orlando Bloom and
Brenton
Thwaites, and opened in the U.S. on May 26, 2017.
