South
African design company Formative was contracted by multi-award winning
recording artist and record producer Cassper Nyovest to provide full creative
direction, production & content design, show and technical production for
his fillupthedome show at the Ticketpro Dome, Johannesburg.
The
Production Design was based around his very dynamic music and the creation of special
‘moments’, a process that built throughout the show, revealing different
elements as the music called for them. For lighting and video control,
Formative relied on grandMA2.
The
artist’s brief was to create a live show – in impact – like some of those great
ones that he himself has been inspired by. The only specific request was for
one massive ‘hero’ moment, which he left up to Formative to create.
The
Formative team, led by Formative’s Creative Director Grant Orchard then
directed the entire performance, right down to artist placement and positions
on stage.
“We
familiarised ourselves thoroughly with Cassper’s music before designing the
production so that we could create lighting, video and scenic elements to
match, and then worked very closely with the various different companies in the
Gearhouse South Africa Group to unite these seamlessly in the show,” said Thomas.
Formative
ran two media servers and two grandMA2 full-size consoles, with an additional grandMA2
full-size at ‘dimmer beach’ as well as four MA NPU (Network Processing Unit).
“We ran Art-Net from the media servers into grandMA2 for pixel mapping and
split timecode between all the systems for full redundancy”, Peters explained. “We
also had a four-camera HD IMAG system from
which we captured the feeds and integrated them into the performances via the
media server.”
Continued
Peters: “We set up the entire rig in MA 3D via Vectorworks on an extremely
high-spec PC, with 64Gb of Ram, a 3.3GHz Intel i7 and a nVidia GeForce Titan X,
which, with some tweaks to fixture profiles, was able to deliver a solid 130fps
at 1920×1080 regardless of how many fixtures were running how many effects at
the same time.
This
enabled us to put the entire show into the desk ahead of time, assess how the different
elements worked together, move fixtures around as needed very easily and then
send a final plot off to GHSA for the prep. This detailed level of preparation
made work on site significantly easier for the crew.
“To
some extent, we were creating darkness within the light”, says Thomas. “Visually,
we avoided colours and gobos to create a stark, direct, solid look, using only white,
red and blue, with fixtures focused almost always as narrow as possible. Where
a softer look was needed, we used the prism instead of a gobo, except for
‘Alive’, where good taste dictated a sharp rotating gobo! When used in a
specific moment like this it worked an absolute treat.”
He
adds that they had a great deal of creative freedom on this project which
allowed them to really “Push the boundaries” considering there was only one month
to produce the show from conception to completion.
“It
could not have turned out better, we were all extremely happy with the results and
from what we hear so were the audience” concluded Grant Orchard.
DWR
Distribution CC is MA Lighting’s exclusive distributor in South Africa.
Photos: © Neil Van
Schalkwyk
