As part of the inauguration ceremony of SADARA and SATORP, Protec provided
audio, video, lighting and robotics at the King Abdullah Cultural Centre, Al Jubail in
Saudi Arabia. Attended by King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, the Custodian of the
Two Holy Mosques and a number of government dignitaries, these celebrated new
infrastructure projects by the Sadara Chemical Company (Sadara) and the Saudi
Aramco Total Refining and Petrochemical Co (Satorp). SADARA and SATORP are
among the largest facilities in the refining and petrochemicals industries that
support the objectives of Saudi Vision 2030.

Robert Handley was Protec’s project manager. “Time was one of our biggest
challenges on this job. We had a very small window between confirmation and the
event itself. Part of our full production service was to put together and manage all
the necessary visa and logistical arrangements and what usually takes a matter of
weeks we managed to achieve in days.’

“We took five 40ft trucks of equipment that included an L-Acoustics Kara system for
audio; KUKA LED panels for video which was located left, right and centre and run
with D3 server technology. It also included a comprehensive lighting rig of Clay
Paky and ETC fixtures along with more than 400 Schnick Schnack units, rigging for
over 100m of truss, 6km of cabling and a Robotics system of 6 x KUKA Kr 240-2
and 2 x KUKA Linear Track.’

“We brought in our own truss hung from the main beams of the building,’ opens Ed
Ross, head of audio at Protec. “This allowed us to locate the PA positions
accurately. These still ended up being very wide for the room so it was crucial to
have some powerful 115xtHIQ speakers to cover the VIP section at the front. The
King was seated very far forward at the front so we positioned a 5XT speaker on
the ground a few meters in front of him to make sure he had decent high frequency
coverage and speech intelligibility. We then positioned 4 x 115xtHIQ speakers
towards the back of the room on a truss to make sure there was ample high
frequencies at the back of the auditorium and smooth out the overall frequency
response front to back. The desk was a Digico SD9 with SD-mini and D-rack for
distribution of signal, and we used Figure 53 Qlab for playback and Shure UR series
radio microphones.’

Time proved to be the primary challenge for KUKA robot programmer, Amir
Haghshenas. “Under normal circumstances we would have time for a full setup of
the robots in our warehouse which wasn’t possible here. Each robot needs between
3-4 hours to programme one sequence and we had six different sequences. At the
same time, we needed an empty stage to move the robots and obviously, there
were always people working around the robots. To achieve what we had to in the
time available, we simplified some of the moves. On the night, the show was all
there and looked great.’