See the "show behind the show"

After the audience goes home, there’s another performance that follows nearly every event at the Kansas Expocentre. It’s called the turnover: changing the floor and seating layout from one event to the next. The Expocentre recently completed a series of turnovers that continually transformed Landon Arena for nine days. Thanks to time-lapse photography, you can watch the arena evolve from hockey rink to concert hall to ice theatre, and then revert to hockey all in a four-minute video.

The action started around 10:30 p.m. on Saturday, September 27, 2008. Immediately following the Topeka RoadRunners hockey game, the Expo operations staff began preparing the ice rink for Disney’s High School Musical: The Ice Tour. The show was still five days away, so after a full day of ice prep the rink was covered with flooring and a stage was built for the Carrie Underwood concert. Her road crew arrived in the arena at 7am on September 30th and, after a near-sellout performance by the Grammy winning singer, they were on the road by about 3am on October 1st. Read more...

As you’ll see in the video, the process from a day earlier was then reversed: the stage came down, the floor cover came off, making room for the ice show crew to begin loading in and rigging by 10 a.m. on the 1st – less than 12 hours after Carrie Underwood had left the stage. High School Musical rocked the house for six performances over four days before the Expo staff went to work cleaning the ice and reconstructing the hockey rink.

While all of this was going on in Landon Arena, the Expocentre also hosted two wedding receptions and two banquets in Heritage Hall, plus a reining horse show and the state penning finals in R.R. Domer Livestock Arena, and the Samoyed National Specialty dog show in Exhibition hall. We welcomed more than 22,000 people to the Expocentre over nine days.

The period from September 27th through October 6th, 2008 required 3,941 manhours by the Expocentre operations, security, box office and parking staff; 798 hours from part time workers, 121 hours from skilled laborers, 351 hours from ticket takers and ushers, 60 hours from emergency medical personnel, and over 600 hours from the concession staff. These numbers do not include the work performed by road crew and support personnel that were on-site with Carrie Underwood and High School Musical.

The time-lapse photos were captured with a digital camera shooting one image per minute. Not every minute of the total time period is represented in the video, yet the finished movie is made up of over 4,000 images, each filling two frames of video playing at 29.97 frames per second.