Yvan Miron started out like so many young people in the entertainment biz, as a musician. An accident to his finger derailed his guitar playing ability, but not his love for music, as he became a promoter of shows and managing bands back in the 1970s. By the early 1980s, he was working with a friend organizing outdoor events — a feat that can be cumbersome when you are located in Northeast Canada. Quebec certainly has its share of climatic changes. He explains what drove him to start his own staging company.
The History
“It’s extremely demanding, organizing outdoor events. Back then, we built stages from standard scaffolding or what we could get, and they didn’t always protect the bands and gear from the elements. We had so many near misses with weather and delays. We were in a risky and stressful business and realized that if we wanted to live to be 40 years old, we had to do something about it. I had to make life a little easier,” states Miron. He realized what he needed was a covered stage that could block elements, be erected in a single day and replace all the manual and often unskilled labor that was necessary to build outdoor stages at the time. “We wanted to use the money we were paying all these laborers to buy equipment. The other important thing was, we needed a stage that could move from one place to another rapidly.”
Back in 1982, Yvan and his friend came up with their first concept. “Everyone seemed to think it was a great idea. We talked to a construction company who agreed it could be done. The only person who didn’t think it was a good idea was the bank manager.” In 1984, he built his first prototype and during the 1980s used it on his own shows and various festivals. He used his own money to finance and develop the technology. “It was quite a contraption, to say the least. But the sound, lights and festival companies liked it.” He built five different prototypes during the 80’s and early 90’s. At the time, he found out that his concept of mobile stages did not really exist as such in North America and in Europe. This led him to his decision to strictly focus on the development, design and construction of small to large size models of mobile stages now known as the Stageline SL and the SAM Series. And ever since the early 1990s, with the help of his longtime partner Marius Chouinard and a string of professionals, he has strived to keep making a better product – something he still does today by tinkering with his designs and upgrading them. For instance, his first 550 stage could handle 24,000 pounds of gear. Now, a similar size model holds 95,000 pounds. “With the advent of the upstage video wall, we had to adapt and change so we could hold that weight.”
Safety and Speed
“Safety had no norms at the time, and that was unacceptable. We saw that a change was coming. Sound and lights were becoming more compact, and we had to adapt. My idea was to propose to the industry that stages be built based on the building codes, specifically constructed to deal with the issue of winds, like you would any permanent structure. My goal was to build a safe, reliable and durable pre-assembled mobile stage that could reduce labor and setup costs drastically while answering the technical needs of the industry,” Yvan states. In fact, he wanted staging equipment that would have more in common with heavy duty, hydraulically operated equipment than a staging structure built from the ground up. And, by all indications, Stageline has done that.
Yvan has set in stone some of his own strict safety guidelines. Perhaps the most important one that has to be adhered to is the 2:1 safety ratio. This means that if Stageline has a product that lists the capacity to hold 75 tons, it can actually hold twice that. His large stages are designed to withstand 90 mph winds. In addition, on the SAM Series, they now have weather protection tarps that can roll up or down in minutes, eliminating a giant sail in a windy field.
There’s a misconception that all large outdoor stages take three to five days to set up. That’s simply not the case. I recently went up to Quebec City to witness how their largest technical marvel, the SAM 750, goes together. Eight hours after they parked the first trailer in place, the roof is hanging at head height and the crew are attaching the traveling production’s rigging motors to the grid. Of course, they could rig the points with the roof erected, but since the roof goes up and locks in place in mere minutes, this saves yet more time. Another eight hours, and the entire stage is built, including loading docks, stage wings, cantilevered side trusses to hang video as well as the FOH risers and other peripheral items. A mere 16 hours and 16 guys and the stage is set with the audio, lights and video hanging.
One of the finer points of the new stages is that they are self-sufficient. They have their own generator and a powerful hydraulic system to extend the telescoping towers from 13 to 62 feet. The system uses winches to spread out the stage and roof elements in accordion fashion, straight from the flatbeds, into place. For the large stage, a crane is needed, as each tower on the four-post roof weighs in at 12,500 pounds. The towers sit on an 8,000-pound steel plate that helps distribute the weight on the ground. Motorized levers run all of the winches and hydraulics during setup, each of them with sensors that constantly measure weight loads during the whole setup.
Stageline has two facilities for their building operation and currently employs 185 personnel. They have a large design and engineering team in house that integrates with an experienced team of craftsmen and technicians. All of their products are constructed in North America, despite the fact that their stages are now in 45 different countries. Yvan reckons his stages are used on 20,000 events per year. That averages out to more than 50 shows per day. There seems to be no slowing down as they continue to design new things, including a traveling IMAX theater that can hold 160 people. Keeping up with current designs, the company recently released their Followspot and Delay tower to the world.
The Latest Feat of Engineering
With the elimination of scaffolding from the stage area, the next logical item Stageline needed to tackle was a sleek alternative to the bulky towers needed for followspots and to hang audio delay stacks or video screens. Traditionally, these structures blocked sightlines and eliminated the sale of certain seats. Yvan explains, “The festivals came to me and asked what I can do. They didn’t want massive concrete blocks as ballast with wires running down, and they wanted a thin structure with a small footprint.” Once again, Yvan and his team of designers and engineers wanted a system that was self-supporting. So they came up with something that takes four technicians and two hours to set up while eliminating the blockage of sightlines for people behind it.
The entire system is compact and simple to set up. It packs up even faster. Starting with the way Stageline can fit two of these structures on one flatbed is a feat anyone who’s ever loaded a truck will appreciate. Once the truck is unloaded, the system is laid out in an orderly fashion with large steel truss sections forming an X shape around a corner block in the center. The custom truss assembly pins together. Down the other end is the hydraulic mechanism that fits in a three-foot space when closed together. Once everything is connected in the X shape, side trusses are added to the X to make a rigid 24-foot box structure that sits three feet high.
Attached at the end of each of the truss sections are the ballasts. They are flat steel plates that weigh 1,500 pounds. They are carried into place with fork lifts and attached. This eliminates the dreaded concrete blocks, 55-gallon water drums and extra guy wires. The user gets a bonus as these old areas that were previously off limits to the crowd can double as ADA accessible areas or VIP areas. Now it’s time to attach the 60 foot tower. The bottom 10.5 feet of truss is steel with one end attached to the center truss block. Once attached the hydraulic cylinder that will be used to “Iwo-Jima” the whole tower is connected to the other end of the truss. The remaining 50 feet of the tower’s box truss is 24-inch high-strength steel. That gets connected next and lies parallel to the ground.
While the tower is on its side, the two head blocks are attached. One block faces the stage and will be used in conjunction with four motorized chain hoists needed to lift the spotlight platforms. The motors’ chains are rigged to the head block before it is erected. On the other side is another head block designed to hold a couple more hoists for additional P.A. or a smaller video wall. Yvan notes that if the show situation calls for a larger video wall to be flown, they can do that by hanging it between two towers.
While the techs are fastening everything together, half of the stage decks are put in place manually. Now it’s time for the hydraulics to do the work. It takes approximately five minutes for the truss to erect 90° and the other side of the hinge to fasten it in place. The hydraulics are lifting a tower that weighs 3,500 pounds. By lifting at a constant speed instead of manually, there is no concern of the tall truss slamming into place and wobbling around as it nears its designated stop point. Once locked in place, the rest of the decking is secured.
A forklift raises the spotlight platforms on the deck. The aluminum spot platforms themselves take little time to attach. The first one slides in place and gets picked up by the four chain hoists. The local lighting company places a spotlight in the basket and it raises up eight feet in order to attach the next one directly under it. As shown in the accompanying photos, the towers can easily hold three baskets, but four baskets are possible as well. Once lifted to the proper trim, the spots are easily locked in place to stop swaying in any wind. The spot operators climb the truss to assume their position. In an emergency, the spot platforms can be lowered from the ground in minutes, no technician is required to climb in the tower to release the baskets from the tower. (The connectors are designed to disengage themselves just by pulling the pods upward about an inch). The audio or video company can load their gear simultaneously, or later; it doesn’t matter, as the tower is safe with just one side loaded.
These towers can withstand 60 m.p.h. (97 km/h) winds with the spot baskets hanging. With the baskets and P.A. removed, the tower can withstand winds up to 90 m.p.h. In the end, you’ve got a free standing structure that did not require a crane, any anchoring or ballasts. I asked Yvan why I still see a couple of guy wires attached to the towers after they are erected. “We could do without the guy wires when we use the delay tower without a LED screen. However, this is part of our safety approach, and we prefer to have redundancy whenever possible. We also believe that it is preferable to have the guy wires, given the height of the tower and the fact that the steel plates under the deck, which work as ballast, are not visible. Technicians and people in charge of site approval are used to seeing ballast and cables — hence the reason we keep them.”
In the end, Stageline has added another important piece to their vast collection of portable stages. “Our goal was to make these towers as timeless as possible and to look nice,” concludes Yvan. “We can safely hang 10,000 pounds from a single tower while remaining unobtrusive to the audience.”
For more details, go to www.stageline.com.
