(16/03/2015) Durban in South Africa once again came alive with the buzz and the excitement of the 2015 Metro FM Awards, with Robe BMFL Spots taking centre stage as part of a rig of nearly 150 Robe moving lights - for a stunning stage presentation at the Albert Luthuli International Convention Centre.
Staged for the third consecutive year right in the heart of the city, attended by 4000 enthusiastic guests and VIPs, the massive evening organised by one of the country's leading radio stations was broadcast live on national channel SABC1 and saw the presentation of 20 coveted awards and nine special live performance collaborations.
Co-ordinating all the technical elements was Dream Sets. Their Project manager was Robert Hoey, who was also working on the event for the third year for event producers, Blue Moon. Lighting Designer Francois van der Merwe from the Wizardry Group was again asked to add some Metro lighting magic, a task on which he lost no time in specifying the BMFLs as the core of his rig.
The 24 x BMFL Spots were supplied to Dream Sets by MJ Event Gear, the first rental company in SA to invest in these hugely powerful new multi-purpose fixtures from Robe. This was their first high profile show since MJ took delivery a few weeks beforehand.
Lighting equipment for the Metro FM Awards was a combination of kit from Johannesburg-based Dream Sets and MJ, with additional support from locally based Black Coffee.
Francois was delighted to be the first LD in the country to use the BMFL Spots on a high profile live TV show and the first worldwide as far as we know at time of writing to use two BMFLs as Follow Spots.
After completing the programming of over 500 show cues in three intense overnight sessions, his reaction was, They are completely amazing fixtures! You could quite easily have an entire rig just of BMFLs and I will definitely be using them again whenever possible!
His starting point for lighting the Metro Awards show was the set designed by James McNamara which comprised 30 scenic shards rigged asymmetrically around the stage, and a multi-level stage which stepped right down to audience level at the front. Three projection screens continued the gentle asymmetry upstage, the whole concept bringing a clean and contemporary visuality to the performance space.
The BMFLs were positioned on the 11 over-stage-and-audience sections of trussing and used extensively throughout the three hour show for a mix of stage and audience washes and specials and also for texturing the floor of the set with gobo looks, which worked brilliantly for all the overhead camera shots.
Using one type of very bright fixture I could do all the beam and spot work and all the gobo effects I needed, explained Fran ois, admitting that the BMFLs were so bright that to ensure the lighting was balanced for the projection, he ran them at 40 per cent for the entire show! In fact he did go to 100% once, when the lights were in a colour and full gobo look.
They completely exceeded my expectations in every way, he enthused.
Seeing them in a demo room is one thing, but utilizing them in a show environment is something very different that's when you REALLY realise how bright they are, just how streamlined the colour mixing really is, how beautifully flat the beam is right the way through the path, the finesse of the dimming curve, the incredible depth of focus even if you pull half focus on the gobo the beam is still perfectly crisp!
In short, he is completely blown away by the BMFL Spots having used them on a complex and pressurised show like this, where the challenges were to make it look great on camera as well as live, and ensure that TV director Nadia White had all the shots she needed for the top-rated telecast.
Robert Hoey also thought they were great! He'd first used four briefly as a beam effect on a show at Plettenberg Bay at the end of 2014, and this time he was able to see their full potential unleashed. They are absolutely beyond my expectations he declared, They will look great on all types of shows from stadiums and arenas to smaller concerts and events .
Both he and Fran ois were keen to try them in follow spot mode, so Robe's South African distributor DWR co-ordinated delivery of the custom follow spot handles that can be fitted to the back of the BMFL Spot unit that allows it to be used as an extremely bright and very lightweight follow spot.
Two BMFL Follow Spots were mounted on underhung truss mount chairs also supplied by MJ on the advanced truss just above the front row of the audience.
With follow spot' mode selected, pan / tilt is disabled so the unit can be moved manually and all the fixture's other parameters iris, intensity, colour mixing etc. - were controlled through Fran ois' grandMA 2 console. All the operators had to do was point the BMFL Spot in the right directions.
They both selected medium' from the three available traction modes that alter the physical handling of the BMFL in Follow Spot mode.
This enabled Fran ois to have really neat, elegant, high-angle follow spotting with no ugly light-spill onto the stage, all helping with the slickness of the overall aesthetics. The already mentioned incredibly smooth dimming of the unit allowed him to fade-in and out on camera Completely unnoticed .
It was the first time he had run follow spots like this. The task is always a tricky and frequently unsatisfactory compromise between needing lumens on camera and trying to contain the unwanted ones splattering uncontrollably elsewhere - and he was very happy with the results.
He also used 120 other Robe moving lights on the rig.
Seventy-two LEDBeam 100s were dotted around the production trusses and primarily used to light the set shards and for some beam effects. Their small size and high brightness ideal for b
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(16/03/2015) Durban in South Africa once again came alive with the buzz and the excitement of the 2015 Metro FM Awards, with Robe BMFL Spots taking centre stage as part of a rig of nearly 150 Robe moving lights - for a stunning stage presentation at the Albert Luthuli International Convention Centre.
