Gearhouse South Africa Supplies The City Of Johannesburg's New Year's Eve Event

Gearhouse South Africa supplied full technical production, design, crew and equipment - including lighting, visuals, video, audio, set, staging and power - to the official City of Johannesburg's New Year's Eve 2008-09 celebrations.
For the fifth year running, this was staged at Mary Fitzgerald Square in downtown Johannesburg and broadcast live on SABC 2.
Gearhouse's Tim Dunn designed a unique new roof structure for the occasion which combined elements from one of Gearhouse In2structures' Dome venues with a StageCo roofing system.
The dome structure had fully transparent skins, allowing Dunn to light the stage from above, with lights rigged on the 25-metre Stageco mothergrid above, blasting right through the roof to the stage. This created a vibrant new dimension to the whole show.
Dunn also designed the stage, set, lighting, specialist visuals and all the show's video media.
Upstage on the deck, under the Dome roof, where 4 vertical curved trusses that hooked over at the top ends, used to provide dynamic multi-focus moving light positions.
The show was headlined by South African chart-toppers Freshlyground, plus a star-studded line-up including KB, Gang of Instrumentals, Wonderbloom, Blesem, Howza, Fikile Mlomo, DJ Jam DDJ Zee and others.
At the back of the stage, Dunn positioned a massive Lighthouse high resolution LED video screen, measuring 28 metres wide by 5 metres high, supplied by LED Vision. This was integrated seamlessly into the physical flow of stage and set and used to show a collection of tailor-made media - both narrative and abstract - produced by Gearhouse Media's Marcel Wijnberger to Dunn's brief.
Keeping the stage looking clean and clear brought a functional bonus of aiding quick band changeovers. Dunn's concept of adding attitude and further shape to the stage with industrial style corrugated texturing was achieved by cladding the set exteriors with custom designed and printed vinyl. The set was constructed by a team from SDS.
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 a Barco Encore multiscreen management system, utilised to fit and send everything to 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 3 grandMA Video media servers being used for controlling the show's media and video content.
Over 120 moving light fixtures were used - a combination of Martin Professional and Robe. Thirty-two new i-Pix BB4 LED blinders were placed above the clear skin of the Dome to light the stage from above. The rig also include approximately 200 conventional lights - PARs, Molefeys, Phillips 400W floods and asymmetric floods, plus 4 x Gladiator and 4 x Supertrooper Xenon spotlights.
Audio equipment was all supplied by Gearhouse Audio with FOH mixed by Tom Gordon and monitors by Cyril 'Rasta' Sewela, both using Yamaha PM5D consoles.
The main arrays - rigged off two TFL V-Towers consisted of 12 VDOSC elements over 8 SB28 subs a side, augmented with dv-DOSC infills and a dv-DOSC delay for the VIP Area on the steps of the African Museum.
All these were driven by networked LA8 amplifiers. Gordon utilised all the PM5Ds outboards and 2 Dolby Lake Processor for system EQ and routing. He also used a small analogue console for VT and in-between band playbacks and the presenter slots.
Monitors were L-Acoustics HiQ 115 wedges, with dvSUBs for the drums. Gearhouse Audio also supplied a full package of mics and stands including Shures and Sennheisers, with Shure SM58 radios for the vocals.
Production power for the entire event was supplied by four 300KVA synchronised genny sets from Gearhouse Power.
(KMcA/JM)