Gearhouse goes to town for Bidvest

SOUTH AFRICA: Gearhouse South Africa was once again called in to supply the lighting, visuals and sound for the large-scale production that is the Bidvest Awards Gala Dinner. The annual three-day extravaganza is one of the largest functions on South Africa's corporate calendar.

The theme for the event this year was Bidvest on Broadway and saw a cast of singers, dancers and Broadway entertainers perform in a specially created stage show for the company's top executives and employees.

Pieter Joubert from Gearhouse company Sets, Drapes, Screens (SDS) served as the set and technical director while Eyal Yehezkely project managed Gearhouse's team of lighting, audio, content and staging specialists. Tim Dunn was the show and lighting director. Based on a very precise brief, Mr Dunn and the Gearhouse team provided graphics, video and full 3D on a stage set comprised of 1,001 LED panels. Each 'stage set' on the LED panels reflected a particular Broadway or New York street scene, vista or interior, in keeping with the musical number being performed.

'Providing the perspective and the physical environments of the sets through graphics and lighting, as well as set changes, meant that the cumulative intensity of the LED panels had to be controlled to the nth degree,' explained Mr Dunn. 'Even a slight miscalculation would have meant the performers being obliterated for the audience by the background set.'

'The amount of detail that went into the on-screen content was amazing,' added LEDVision's Graeme Baker, the LED systems supervisor on the team. 'For example, clouds scudding across the skyline in an exterior scene, as well as all of the moving billboard scenes, demanded that our content managers and producers, our programmers, lighting teams ? in fact, everyone involved behind the scenes on the tech and production crew, had to collaborate fully to achieve the results we and the client wanted. A good example was the way in which the programmers incorporated the live footage of the Bidvest award winners into the 3D set ? we achieved levels of detail that were no small feat given that we were working with well over 2 million individual LEDs.'

There was further collaboration with the incorporation of the sound and musical direction into the lighting, visuals and virtual set cueing. 'We designed a system in which the Wings media system would run multitracks out through a Dante network to the Watchout timecoding,' said Mr Dunn. 'We were using the new version of Watchout on this production, version 6.'

'The cueing from the music director was completely integrated, through the Wings and Watchout systems, with the audio, lighting and video cues, thus creating a tightly integrated technical backbone for the show,' added audio systems supervisor, Jako De Wit. 'Our sound systems were appropriate for the large theatre space. The bulk of the speaker setup was from L-Acoustics. A straightforward left-centre-right configuration gave us a great sound spread and coverage through the Convention Centre space, and we used Shure headset mics for a visually sleek look for the performers. The main characteristic of the set-up, though, was how we were able to integrate the sound, cueing, and lighting with the musicians, performers, and the amazing LED set.'

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