Robe finds another Voice in South Africa
- Details
Multi-Media were again appointed as technical production company by TV producers AMPN, with Joshua Cutts of Visual Frontier once again appointed as lighting designer.
The show, aired on M-Net, moved from a 500-capacity studio to the 3000-seater Mosaiek Teatro in Fairland, Johannesburg, prompting series director Darren Hayward to “go for it” with more drama and excitement.
Josh specified over 200 Robe fixtures across the series, a package co-ordinated by Multi-Media’s Chris Delancey. As well as lighting the artists, stage and set, Josh paid a lot of attention to the audience lighting, for which he adopted a subtle EDM-style approach.
Lights were rigged on a set of ‘finger’ trusses running upstage / downstage, fanning out from the centre, facilitating a fantastic dynamic range for the focus positions.
24 LEDBeam 1000s were among the first fixtures to be placed on the rig as he drew up the plot, dotted around the fingers, their immense power zapped to create primary beam-work above the space and rich colour washes sweeping across the stage.
With the scale of the room more prominent this year and all the long shots reminding people of the large and enthusiastic audiences, he upped the BMFL count to 12 BMFL Blades, all used from key and front lighting plus a range of specials.
In the upstage filler positions 18 x Pointes were distributed around the fingers, working closely with 24 x miniPointes on the floor, and – in the trusses - LEDBeam 100s for supplementary beams and 16 x CycFX 8s to fill in the black holes upstage. This enabled sufficient beam coverage, facilitating effects and other looks and tricks to permeate the performance space.
For a special episode featuring leading SA rockers Prime Circle, Josh added a specials package of 12 Spiiders which were located on truss totems upstage of the band.
For the finale, 40 Spikies were added to the rig and used to accent the lines of the set and to delineate the stage / mezzanine. For the programming, two grandMA2 light consoles were utilised and ran a VPU for the pixel mapping.
(Jim Evans)
