JOHANNESBURG — Gearhouse South Africa’s Tim Dunn had the goal of avoiding the same old thing for the City of Johannesburg’s New Year’s Eve event, and with a little help from Mother Nature, his wish was answered by the bucketfull. “The challenge was on to imagineer a totally different set of aesthetics from anything else that’s ever been seen or done before in Mary Fitzgerald Square or any other downtown location,” said Dunn, who had worked with Gearhouse on many other events there in the past.
Gearhouse supplied full technical production, design, crew and equipment, including lighting, visuals, video, audio, set, staging and power, to the downtown square, the locale for New Year’s festivities for the fifth year running. The event was broadcast live on SABC 2.
Dunn designed a new roof structure for the occasion, combining elements from Gearhouse In2structures’ domes with a StageCo roofing system. The dome had transparent skins, allowing Dunn to light the stage from lights rigged on the 25 meter Stageco mothergrid above, blasting right through the roof to the stage.
But while this strategy created an opportunity for a new visual experience, Mother Nature provided an equally memorable wallop. An hour before the live TV broadcast began, gale-force winds and sheets of rain forced the crew to quickly move the DJ decks upstage center and quickly construct a makeshift tent for cover.
Dunn, who also designed the stage, set, lighting, specialist visuals and all the show’s video media, envisioned using the four vertical curved trusses under the dome roof for moving light positions that could adapt to the varying needs of the different bands on stage, incluging Freshlyground, KB, Gang of Instrumentals, Wonderboom, Blesem, Howza, Fikile Mlomo, DJ Jam DDJ Zee and others.
Along with the need to meet the technical and creative demands of the live broadcast, “it had to be a memorable part of the experience for the 30,000 people seeing the show live,” Dunn noted.
As it turned out, however, the artists waiting backstage to perform opted against staying dry, and celebrated the arrival of 2009 en masse, dancing and splashing in the rain with their already-soaked fans, many of them undoubtedly grateful for the relief from South Africa’s hot New Year’s weather.
Along with the dome, the event used a 28-by-5-meter LED video screen supplied by LED Vision, which displayed custom media produced by Gearhouse Media’s Marcel Wijnberger, to Dunn’s brief. The set, constructed by a team from SDS, was clad in custom designed and printed vinyl.
Dunn operated lighting for all bands using a grandMA full size console. A second grandMA full size, operated by Wijnberger, supplied all the video playback content. This was linked into to a Barco Encore multiscreen management system, used to fit and send everything to the screen.
The Encore system routed and scaled content from both the MA servers and a TX feed from the SABC OB truck onto a series of non-standard format screens.
The lighting rig included 116 i-Pix Satellite LED brick lights attached to the top of the Dome roof supports and a series of custom made scaff pipes. These fixtures were all pixel-mapped into one of three grandMA Video media servers being used for controlling the show’s media and video content.
Over 120 moving light fixtures from Martin Professional and Robe and 32 i-Pix BB4 LED blinders were placed above the clear skin of the Dome to light the stage from above. The rig also included approximately 200 conventional lights — PARs, Molefeys, Phillips 400W floods and asymmetric floods, plus four Gladiator and four Supertrooper Xenon spotlights.
For more information, please visit www.gearhouse.co.za.
