Castrol Performanc Pitch - Day One

06:00 start on site, all pretty much as we expected. Spent the first hour or two marking out the structures, pitch and hoardings to make sure everything will fit together as planned.


The boys from Lossberger arrived and in an extraordinary display of efficency they erected and levelled the structure floor and erected the roof, panels and glass surround in under five hours. This allowed the set team to crack on and pretty much fit out the internal stud walls by the close of play.


It's always tense seeing a space that you've only seen on paper come together in the flesh. I'm pretty pleased with the end result, all the rooms feel comfortable from a space point of view and the people flow through the structure will work well - from registration to the first changing room, into the tunnel, out onto the pitch, back into the second changing room and finally on into the players lounge so they can see how they performed. We can have five groups of ten players on the site at any one moment and they'll never see each other - this means our throughput can be dramatically increased.

Meanwhile the truss structure on the steps came together as planned (though a little larger than drawn!) - it's weighted down with 6 tonnes of water ballast to prevent any movement from the wind.


The structure will hold the large outdoor LED screen that shows the live tracking system in action and also supports the array of cameras that follow and record the player's movement around the pitch. It will be clad with flats and then wrapped in a large printed graphic.

We finished up at about 20:30 before heading over to the Kempster production office to meet up with Jamie and see all the collateral we've been designing over the last few months, then quick bit to eat and home to bed by midnight.