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Places of worship · Conventions

Conventions and retreats, at the scale they actually run

Multi-day gatherings on open ground for tens of thousands of people, plus everyone following it from abroad. The largest single production most religious institutions commission all year.

The short version

Closer to a music festival than a church service

The largest religious gatherings in South India are not services with extra chairs. A major Kerala convention runs for the better part of a week, on open ground or a riverbed, for crowds in the tens of thousands, with people arriving by bus from three states. Operationally that is far closer to a music festival than to a Sunday morning, and it needs to be planned like one.

Scale changes what the problems are. Sound has to reach people standing hundreds of metres from the stage, which means delay towers rather than a bigger PA, because past a certain distance the physics stop cooperating and speech arrives as an echo. Screens stop being a nice addition and become the only way most of the ground sees anything at all. Power comes from generators and needs to be planned as its own system. And the stream is competing with tens of thousands of phones on the same few towers, which is precisely when venue connectivity is least trustworthy.

Then there is the audience that is not on the ground. Conventions are the events the diaspora plans its year around — people take leave for them, and those who cannot travel watch every session. That audience is often larger than the physical one, which makes the stream a primary deliverable rather than a byproduct of the AV.

None of this is improvised well. Convention work is won or lost in the planning weeks: the site survey, the power plan, the delay tower positions, the crew rotation across six days, and the decision about what happens when it rains on the biggest evening.

What we do

The parts that make up the job.

01

Full multi-day production

Cameras, vision mixing, sound and screens for the whole run, planned as one operation with rotation built in.

02

Sound at distance

Delay towers and a coverage plan for open ground, so someone at the back hears speech rather than an echo of it.

03

Large-format screens

LED at a size that works in daylight at real viewing distances — for most of the ground, this is the event.

04

Streaming as a primary deliverable

Our own bonded connectivity, because a ground with tens of thousands of phones on it is the least reliable network environment there is.

05

Session recording and archive

Every session captured and delivered, not just the headline evenings. Institutions reuse these all year.

06

A highlights film

The cut that carries the convention into the following year's promotion and fundraising.

How it runs

How a convention is planned

  1. 01

    Survey the ground early

    Months out. Power, access, stage position, sightlines, where delay towers can stand, and how the ground drains if it rains.

  2. 02

    Plan power as a system

    Generators, distribution and conditioning designed properly. On open ground power is the failure that takes everything else with it.

  3. 03

    Build the rotation

    Six days of named crew per position with relief. Nobody should be running a headline evening at the end of their fifth sixteen-hour day.

  4. 04

    Rehearse a full session

    A complete end-to-end run — sound, screens and stream — the day before it opens, not on the opening morning.

Why Gloworks

One crew, one roof, start to finish.

01

We plan for rain on the big night

Weather protection, drainage and a contingency for the largest evening, because that is the one that will test it.

02

Delay towers, not a bigger PA

The right answer for distance is more distributed sound, and getting this wrong is the most common failure at scale.

03

The stream is a deliverable, not an afterthought

For a convention the remote audience is frequently larger than the ground. It gets its own connectivity, its own operator and its own redundancy.

04

One team across cameras, sound and screens

At this scale, coordinating three vendors at midnight is its own failure mode.

Where we work

Where we work conventions

Across South India from Bengaluru. Kerala's convention season is the regular run, and multi-day work at this scale comfortably justifies travel — for a week-long booking, where the ground is matters far less than when it is.

  • Bengaluru
  • Kochi
  • Kottayam
  • Thrissur
  • Thiruvananthapuram
  • Chennai
  • Coimbatore
  • Hyderabad
  • Mangaluru
  • Goa

Frequently asked

The questions we get every week.

How early do we need to start planning?

Months. A convention needs a site survey, a power plan, delay tower positions and a crew rotation, and the good crew and the large LED get committed early. Six weeks is enough for a feast day and nowhere near enough for this.

Can you cover every session, or only the main ones?

Every session, and it is usually worth it — the recordings of the smaller sessions get used all year, and the remote audience often watches the ones the ground did not attend.

What happens if it rains on the largest evening?

It is planned for. Weather protection on every position, a power distribution that tolerates it, and a contingency agreed with the organisers in advance. The plan exists before it is needed, not during.

How is sound handled over that distance?

With delay towers rather than a louder system. Past a certain distance a single stack arrives late and speech turns into echo, so coverage is distributed and time-aligned across the ground.

Will the stream handle the number of people watching?

That part is the platform's problem rather than ours — YouTube scales. Our job is getting a reliable feed off a field with tens of thousands of phones competing for the same towers, which is why we bring bonded connectivity rather than using the site's.

Keep reading

Start the conversation early.

Conventions are won in the planning weeks. Tell us the dates and the ground and we will come and look at it.