The Crossover festival is the biggest Christian youth festival in Scotland, attracting teenagers and young people from all over the country. We have been involved in the event in some form or another since the very beginning, and for the last five years have planned and provided a unique youthwork venue for Impact, part of the Church of Scotland’s board of National Mission.

For the last two summers Crossover has been held at Cultybraggan army camp, which means that we have been given a Nissan Hut to transform. It is a unique and challenging venue, but we have been very pleased with the results.

The “Aquarium”, as it is known, is a place for teenager to gather, chill out and chat during the day. In the evenings there are several high energy gameshow style events, which have demanding audio-visual requirements.

We arrived on site early on Friday morning, with just a few hours to effect a complete transformation. First the venue had to be cleared of furniture, before we could bring all our equipment in. We assembled a customised stage, with a narrow catwalk making best use of the available space. Lots of different lighting styles are required for the varied events, so we brought a wide selection of our inventory including effects projectors, oil lamps, UV tubes and moonflowers, as well as lots of standard stage lamps.

A long tunnel is quite a challenging space to do sound in! We got round the potential problems by using a distributed speaker system, with a number of electronic delays to keep everything together. Video was also an issue, so we used eight CRT monitors as well as an "ez fold" projection screen.

The biggest challenge was fitting everything in, whilst leaving enough room for the smooth running of events. Various innovative and imaginative rigging solutions were required to minimise the space that equipment took up.

The main events are very fast paced, with heavy audio-visual demands. There is a mixture of video clips, various presentations, and live camera work. To cut down the clutter of control equipment we moved all the video gear (and operators) into an adjoining room.

Our venue was one of the most popular on site. It was packed for all the main events, with a steady stream of youngsters during the “drop in” sessions.