We took care of the Paris 2024 closing ceremonies: here’s what no one saw.
I’m Lucía Arribas, founder of Solutions Prompteur. It’s hard to describe the joy we had celebrating the final torch relay and the Paris 2024 closing ceremonies LIVE.
We were in Peru in 2017 with the whole French delegation fighting to bring the Olympic Games to France… and this year, that dream has come true.
In this article, I’m going to share a very special strategy with you. If you suspect that at an event, you will have to include several screen projections with subtitles, translations, images… Be careful!
80,698 people watched the event Live in the Stade de France.
80,698 people inside, millions at home.
I’m telling you this so you can imagine how important it was that nothing went wrong during the subtitled speeches. If anything went wrong, a speaker would have been exposed in front of the entire planet.
For this closing ceremonies, we were asked to do a double service:
1. On the one hand, to accompany the speakers with the prompter.
2. On the other, and at the same time, to send the simultaneous translation via prompter to all the giant screens in the Stade de France.
In my 20-year career, I’ve seen it all, but this event… it’s as close to a Champions League final as a non-footballer could imagine. There are no words to express it. If you get out of here alive, I think you can do anything.
Why do I say that?
The biggest challenge had almost nothing to do with the prompter.
With the prompter, no problem.
But for the subtitles, they had to be displayed simultaneously with the translations of what was said by the speakers, as well as by the ‘Voice of God’ at the Stade de France. All these announcements were managed by us and had to be made using our prompter software.
That was the theory… but in practice, it was something different.
We were four in the team and we worked during night time.
During the day, all competitions were taking place and it was impossible to do rehearsals, so we rehearsed from 10pm to 6am.
For the subtitles, I had planned to use the prompter software in a way that’s very little used and fairly unknown. Instead of scrolling from bottom to top, as is usually the case, we went straight to the next sentence. Instead of scrolling through the text, markers were placed on the text and a button was used to jump from sentence to sentence in a similar way to subtitles in a film.
What was the problem?
How to meet the aesthetic demands of image projection: beyond the classic prompter service.
We received very few instructions before the shows. It wasn’t until the last night of rehearsals, at 4 in the morning, that we were surprised with aesthetic demands that prompter software can’t handle… but 20 years of experience can.
There were aesthetic limitations on the presentation of the font, the colors, the shape…
I could see that if we had a lot of text to manage at the last minute (to add as subtitles), it could become complicated, because we needed a lot of time to place our cues, and everything was calculated to the millimeter.
At 4 o’clock in the morning, the day before the first closing ceremony, I’m forced to say: “Guys, we’ve got to do it all over again”.
Obviously, I was getting tired, but I decided to ‘change my tune’ and switch from using the prompter to using another piece of software where I could create windows with perfect alignment for each sentence.
I could manage the backgrounds, I had more choice over the color of the fonts, the aesthetics… I could do all this while simultaneously sending 4 or 5 different images.
On the broadcast screen at the Stade de France, we sent a text in English, a text in French (which were in different colours) and there was also the image of the person doing the sign language.
A key aspect of high-risk events.
As I said, at 4 o’clock in the morning I realized all this and decided to switch to a whole new world. All our ability to react and discern was deployed that night: we left behind a piece of software with which we were comfortable, but which could have limited us.
We had to get out of that famous comfort zone to anticipate needs and really meet quality standards, and above all aesthetic requirements for the event.
Frankly, such a change with less than two hours to go before the end of rehearsals can only be justified by experience and a deep technical understanding of the context.
The change was a success, but it wasn’t a gamble.
At an event like this, you can’t afford to make bets.
You either know how to do it… or you know how to do it.
Although the organization wasn’t optimal for us, everything I experienced made me love France even more.
We are so proud to have contributed our little grain of sand to France’s magnificent achievements through these Olympic & Paralympic Games, which are so beautiful, moving, creative, innovative, inclusive, historic and dreamlike…
I write this with emotion, feeling deep in my heart that I love French people, that I love France, and that I am terribly proud to have contributed to such a historic moment as these Paris 2024 Olympic Games.
Lucía ARRIBAS
PS: I hope this publication has been useful to you. I only publish 25% of this information on the web. If you’re in the events business, I’m sharing privately the tips I’ve observed from the most sought-after production directors in France (and around the world) after working with many of them for over 20 years. This information is free of charge and will help you avoid many coordination errors during an event, thereby increasing your prestige.
Where can I find all this information? In my newsletter.
If you’re interested in receiving it, you can sign up below:
*It’s as easy to get on my list as it is to get off.