The recent Brit Awards continued their theme of increasingly spectacular production and performances, and once again High End Systems' Hog 4 consoles were used to control lighting and video during the event. The 35th edition of the British annual pop music awards was held at the O2 arena in London, and featured live performances from Taylor Swift, Sam Smith, Royal Blood, Ed Sheeran, Kanye West, Take That, George Ezra, Paloma Faith and Madonna.　　Lighting programmer Ross Williams was joined at front-of-house by programmer Theo Cox, once again under the direction of lighting designer Al Gurdon. Stage design was by Es Devlin who embraced the hand writing theme of this years’ trophy created by artist Tracy Emin. This production was the fifth Brit Awards that Williams has participated in over the last decade. He comments, "Theo and I both used full-sized Hog 4 consoles, with a further console each as a backup. This has become a pretty standard arrangement for me now on such shows."　　High End Systems' continuing development of Hog 4 software has kept designers excited since the console's launch. Ross says, "A lot of work has been done on the software over the past year to enhance performance, speed and reliability of the overall system. This is really noticeable on these larger shows which benefit tremendously from the continued software evolution."
　　"While clearly there is a huge amount of preparation work off-site on the design and production planning side of things, there was no pre-programming or visualization done, meaning there was a lot of work to do on-site over a few long days. And even though recent advances in the console have certainly helped to speed up some of the more time-consuming aspects of programming, there’s no way to avoid the inevitable late nights!"　　Lighting was once again supplied by PRG under the supervision of crew chief Richard Gorrod and his fantastic team. Ross adds, "Yet again Richard and his crew did an amazing job. This really is the best support you could wish for front of house, and is so often overlooked."
　　In closing, Williams says, "There are a number of systems capable of servicing these large scale shows today, but for me the Hog 4 is the one I’m most comfortable with. There is an aggressive continued rollout of features and enhancements, and each release adds a couple more reasons to stick with the brand, which really is going from strength to strength. It’s fair to say there’s always more work to be done, but things are improving dramatically on an almost monthly basis, like never before. We missed out on newly released Version 3 for this show, which is again another huge leap forward for the platform. I remain very excited about ongoing work from the development team and look forward to seeing some really great enhancements, yet to be implemented, further cement the console's reputation."