NELSPRUIT, South Africa – Robe moving lights were at the hub of the lighting action for a Main Stage design by Johan Ferreira from JSF Productions at the 2012 Innibos Festival in South Africa. The organizers wanted to up the ante on the look and feel of the event – and in particular the Main Stage – so Ferreira set about designing looks with a theatrical feel. This was his seventh year to design the lighting.
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NELSPRUIT, South Africa – Robe moving lights were at the hub of the lighting action for a Main Stage design by Johan Ferreira from JSF Productions at the 2012 Innibos Festival in South Africa.
The four-day arts and culture extravaganza, held in Nelspruit at the Bergvlam School Grounds, was attended by 120,000 people. Technical production for the Main and Klipdrift stages was supplied by Martindale, Gauteng-based rental company Sound Headquarters. It was Ferreira’s seventh year of designing the lighting.
The festival recently won a KykNET Fiestas Award for 2011’s Best Festival. With that distinction, the the organizers wanted to up the ante on the look and feel of the event – and in particular the Main Stage – so Ferreira set about designing something special.
The 52 Robe fixtures included a mix of ROBIN 600 LEDWashes, ROBIN 600E Beams, ColorSpot 700E AT and 250E ATs and Scan 575 XTs.
Each day the Main Stage hosted between 7 and 10 major artists among other performers, so the pressure was also on to make all look individual and deal with a wide variety of musical genres.
Ferreira’s approach was to bring a theatrical look to the stage. Although much of the show is improvised, it’s imperative to him that everything looks programmed and pre-planned down to the finest details. “There’s no reason a large outdoor stage can’t resemble an intimate and personal theatrical space,” he explains.
The ROBIN 600 Beams were positioned on the first three LX trusses in a V shape, with the ColorSpot 700E ATs also flown above the stage.
The LEDWash 600s were rigged on the front truss and used for general stage lighting, while the ColorSpot 250s were scattered around the deck for assorted back-lighting effects.
“The Robe 600E Beams are always a great crowd pleaser,” Ferreira says. He used them for eye-candy, both pointing directly forward and up into the sky in searchlight style.
It was at the award-winning 2011 Innibos Festival when he used Robe’s LEDWash 600 – its fastest selling light – for the first time. Now he refuses to do a show without them.
“I genuinely feel that they are the ultimate LED wash fixture at the moment,” he states.
He thinks the zoom is ideal for washing large performance areas as well as for creating smaller pools of light for specials, which is fundamental to this theatrical take on the lighting. He describes the color mixing as “incredible,” saying that the sheer range, from the saturates to the pastels, really enables his designs to “come alive.”
He is delighted to have had the chance to work with some of the new fixtures over the last 12 months, adding that “specifics stand out like the robust construction and the fact they they are built to travel and tour.”
He appreciates the internally powered LED display on each fixture, which is helpful for addressing fixtures while the crew is busy sorting out power. The light weight of the new ROBIN ranges is also an advantage and makes everything more portable.
“As I have said before, it feels like every Robe fixture was designed and built by an LD. It all works properly, the color mixing is fantastic and the general output is unmatched!”
He uses Robe moving lights on most of his designs – which vary from small school and educational productions to massive corporate events,
Recently he had the chance to light a show at the South African State Theatre in Pretoria which has LEDWash 600s – the first imported into the country by Robe’s SA distributor DWR – in the house rig as well as generic lighting.
In a side by side comparison, what impressed him most was color matching the LEDWash 600s precisely to the gelled and color corrected fresnels. “That’s certainly something that not every LED fixture can do!”
