B&M Golden Quarter
Digital screen content for 1,000 B&M Store Managers at the M&S Bank Arena: an animated identity, branded environments and full digital sets across five LED canvases.
There was a lot of screen to play with on this one.
For B&M Golden Quarter, produced by Square Fish Events, ASCEND was brought in to create the digital screen content for an event bringing more than 1,000 B&M Store Managers together at the M&S Bank Arena.
The day moved through conference sessions, an exhibition and a large evening celebration, with the arena completely transformed around the B&M brand. Our part of that transformation lived across the stage.
The screen setup gave us a brilliant canvas: a large central LED screen surrounded by two further digital frames, with curved screens sitting on either side of the stage. We created content across the different formats, including an animated event logo, branded environments and a series of digital sets used behind the evening entertainment and performances.
With that amount of LED in the room, the content could do much more than provide a background. It helped change the character of the stage throughout the event.
Behind the curtain
The interesting challenge was that none of these screens really existed in isolation.
A graphic might begin on the central screen, continue through one of the surrounding frames and then need to make visual sense alongside the curved screens at either side. From the centre of the arena it all had to feel intentional, but we also had to think about how the stage looked from different seating positions around the room.
That made the artwork fairly meticulous.
Patterns, borders and graphic elements had to line up across separate LED surfaces, despite each one having different dimensions and proportions. Something being a few pixels out on a laptop is one thing. Once it is spread across an arena stage, you notice.
We designed the different canvases together, checking how the visual weight moved across the full stage rather than treating each screen as another export size. The large frames were particularly useful because they could extend the graphics beyond the main performance area and make the whole structure feel like one digital set.
For the evening show, that gave us the freedom to move well beyond standard branded holding screens. The content could become part of the performances themselves, with bold animated environments filling the architecture around the performers while the curved side screens carried live camera feeds and supporting visuals.
The festive set pictured here is a good example. The pattern continues through the nested frames and central screen, while the side screens keep the performers visible to an arena-sized audience. There is a lot happening, but it still reads as one stage.
Square Fish Events created the wider event and arena experience. Our job was to make sure all that screen space had something worth putting on it, and that every piece joined up when it got there.
