Restaurant Magazine - World's 50 Best Restaurants 2008

Background

Now in its seventh year, The World's 50 Best Restaurants, presented by Restaurant Magazine, has grown into an eagerly anticipated, internationally influential event. The awards night itself draws interest from the world's media and brings together many of the world's finest chefs and most creative restaurateurs under one roof to celebrate the high profile accolade.

Solution

Revelation has worked with Restaurant Magazine providing a full event production service on the Worlds 50 Best Awards for the last 3 years. This time, in addition to the normal role, the Revelation team were also responsible for the providing an on-site video production services.

Each year the aim is to make the event bigger and better than the last and this gives the Revelation team a huge scope to explore using the latest event technology and effects.

This year the prestigious event was held in the beautiful Freemason's Hall in London and attended by the world's greatest chefs and restaurateurs.

Revelation were responsible for all the audio visual and technical requirements of the show, including the sound, lighting, special effects and filming as well as the set and stage design. The team were also required to provide technical support and live feeds to the numerous news crews who flew in from around the world to cover the show.

The Freemasons Hall presented the Revelation team with a number of challenges; firstly the height of the space was a huge consideration, as well as all the surfaces being concrete and stone. Our considered approach to these was to embrace the space and use it as part of the treatment. This involved lighting the pillars and architectural features with suitable lighting and designing a set that was as impressive as the building itself. With a limited budget to hand the team decided to drape the space in white gauze and project the brand onto them, thus creating a sense of a backdrop to the stage area and reinforce the brand through using gobo projection. These white drapes were also lit to great effect.

The event had a requirement for media content that was to include the countdown from 50 to 1 of the worlds top restaurants. To contrast the classic tradition of the building, Revelation decided to compliment it with contemporary use of widescreen projection technology. Two screens were deployed - one to each side of the stage to maximize audience viewing and impact.

Key feature areas of the building such as stairways and alcoves were also lit to add to the sense of occasion.


Results

The event was an immense success, gaining very positive coverage amongst both national and international mediums.

Restaurant Magazine were delighted with the result of the awards ceremony as well as with the Revelation teams performance both pre event and on-site.

"Because of the long established working relations with the project manager this element of 50 Best is near on stress free. Their understanding of what is important to us and ability to know when to push us / when to ease off makes the partnership of Restaurant magazine and Revelation work."

"What was most striking about the whole affair - the huge projector screens, the wisps of dry ice, the thumping, grandiose music...?"
The Guardian Newspaper