It's the third year in a row that Entec has supplied equipment and crew to the fundraiser, which featured another impressive line-up of top comedy talent in Seann Walsh, David O'Doherty, Sean Lock, Ed Byrne, Stewart Lee, Lucy Porter, Phil Nichol and Greg Burns.
Entec's ability to supply all the technical elements from one source made co-ordination easy for the client as well as enabling a high quality yet cost-effective technical production solution which looked and sounded great.
Entec invited Simon Tutchener to join in the hilarity and create a lighting scheme for the evening. "It was a great show for a worthwhile cause and I thoroughly enjoyed working with all the Entec team as usual," comments Simon, explaining how he lit the show, while Adam Stevenson dealt with all the lighting elements from the office end.
The rig was straightforward - front and back truss - however the placement of fixtures needed to be precise and appropriate for comedy, where the most important focus is on the funny-person onstage - something which can get missed!
Eight bars-of-6 PARs were divided equally between the two trusses and six of a total of eight Clay Paky QWO 800 moving lights were rigged on the back ... and two on the front. The rear ones provided back beam looks and gobo work on the stage floor, while those on the front truss were fitted with custom ZSL gobos which were projected crisply onto the upstage screen.
Eight Vari*Lite VL2000s were used for additional front washes and two follow spots were positioned each side of the balcony.
Simon programmed and ran the show on a grandMA2 light, his console of choice, through which he also triggered the video cues. He worked on site with Entec's lighting crew of Tom Crosbie and Pepper (Pete Schofield).
Will Wright took care of the projection elements which comprised two Barco R10+ machines - main and backup - hung on the front truss and beamed onto a screen flown upstage of the back truss.
A Hippo Critter media server was programmed by Will with the content - graphics and some VT footage - supplied by ZSL. This was networked with the grandMA2 desk which was the easiest, most convenient and practical way of running the cues.
The sound system was specified by Entec's Mark 'Magic' Ellis-Cope. A d&b Q1 series system with 10 Q1 speakers a side formed the main arrays with a total of 10 Q-SUBS subs ground stacked. These were augmented with four Q7 and four E3 in / out-fills.
Two d&b E12s and four M4s were the wedge monitors and FOH engineer Adam Pendse mixed both FOH and monitors from his Midas PRO1 console.
The artists used primarily Shure hand-held SM58 radio mics with a couple of Countryman headsets, all running via an 8-channel Shure UHF-R system.
Adam and Lee were joined on the audio crew by Tom Olorenshaw, one of Entec's new warehouse team.
(Jim Evans)
