Hi all! The event “Del Plato al Planeta: Municipios que transforman“, a conference and workshop on Food Systems and their impact on Climate Change.is now over and I’m coming back home, a bit tired cause of the travel by flight, but happy after all :).
It was very satisfying and everything worked out in the perfect shape I was sure of, even if I had to act as the room sound technician – which I wasn’t supposed to be.
I didn’t had the whole Sound Equipment in charge this time (only Interpretation Technology and Interpreters Coordination, as we used the sound equipment already installed in the room hired by the organization) but in the end I had to organize even the microphones for the conference. Most importantly, I manage to improve and fix the FLOOR1 line for the Interpreters, which initially was not working at all, and I also gave a general sound line-out to the video technicians for their recordings.
The video recordings were made by 2 very nice and technical guys from a project called LAPSE, a video production collective based in Barcelona (Cataluña, Spain) that was in charge of video-recording the whole event, with interviews to some of the participants, in order to post-produce the official videos of this very interesting and important event.
For this event, I had to take a flight with all the necessary – but minimum – equipment, so we weren’t able to use the table-top, wooden-plexiglass cabins that we usually set-up in every event. The Interpreters were sitting at the back of the room as to not disturb the rest of the participants with their voice. About 40 people participated to this conference.
Usually we move around with a small van, as we consider enough to use those plexicabins – as we call them – more environmentally friendly in comparison to the full-on soundproof booths normally used in the Interpretation world, for which you need to move a small truck in order to set-them up – increasing incredibly not only the footprint, but also and more importantly the costs.
The Booths2 that we use – the Plexicabins – were designed more than a decade ago by a pioneer collective project that I co-founded in 2009, and were copied and adapted by dozens of other collectives and organizations all over the world. They are made of a foldable plexiglass structure with a wooden top and are lightweight and environmentally friendly, as we can move them around with ANTS small van together with the rest of the equipment, without the need of a big truck or dedicated set-up team. The plexiglass structure offers a decent soundproofing, while the wooden top ensures cabins stability as it keeps the cabin together.
Anyway, after this technical digression and coming back to the event, I share here some photos: you can click on the “read more” button to see the whole article with the photos!
And soon I will add more photos and some videos the video Technicians from LAPSE will produce!
Many thanks to Maria Aranda Aranda, Gloria Polisena and Laia Sanmartí Vidal, the Interpreters that worked with ANTS for their commitment in participating as volunteers: you were really amazing!
See you all at the next one!
axel
13/12/2024
- Technical expression from Interpreting world. It basically means a sound line for the Interpreters to listen through headphones of everything passing from the main mixer (speakers and intervention, questions from the public but also videos sound from laptops or recordings and online participants, in brief, everything that must be simultaneously interpreted). ↩︎
- Technical expression from Interpreting world. It means the physical space where the Interpreters sits. In a commercial Interpretation set-up, the Interpreters are completely isolated from the rest of the room, sometimes even in another room. They are completely cut-off visually from the rest of the participants, thus eliminating their presence from the event itself. We think that the Interpreters are n important part of the event itself, and should be more visible, as we think they are part of the movement. Those big booths, with a door to enter it, completely soundproof, are also very expensive and bulky, thus requiring even more fund to build and therefore hire them, but most importantly, to transport them. A dedicated team of technicians must be called for the set-up in every venue and they must be transported by big trucks, moving the technicians with another vehicle, like a van with many seats. We like to be lightweight and environmentally friendly, so we use another type of booths, “Plexicabins”, see above, on the article itself. By the way, we don’t use the word “booth”, but instead we call them with a friendly “cabins” 🙂 ↩︎