The final eight-week series was recorded at the Mosaïek Teatro in Fairlands (photo: Duncan Riley)
South Africa - The 2019 season of The Voice South Africa saw technical supplier Multi-Media and production manager Chris de Lancey ask lighting designer Joshua Cutts of Visual Frontier onboard to help the team deliver the show, which Cutts accomplished with some help from a large Robe moving light rig - nearly 150 fixtures.
The final eight-week series was recorded at the Mosaïek Teatro in Fairlands, Johannesburg, and aired on M-Net Channel 101.
Josh worked closely with set designer Dewet Meyer, series director Darren Hayward and TV director Nadia White to carve out an ambience for the 2019 season which saw him programme - intensely - 12 songs a week for the eight-week period.
Lighting - together with sound and video equipment - was delivered by rental company Multi-Media with the set built by JDM Sets. All aspects of the technical production were co-ordinated and overseen for Multi-Media by production manager Chris De Lancey.
The performance environment was divided up with a selection of LED screen columns, LED battens and digital LED strips which enabled Josh to break down the set and isolate or merge different areas. The task was to produce the big ‘televisual’ feel that everyone expects from a show like The Voice, with more intricate details and individual treatments for each artist and song.
A major design challenge for this series was dealing with five PA stacks which were part of the L-Acoustics L-ISA multidimensional sound system, which was supplied by Multi-Media, a first on any Voice production worldwide.
Josh has used Robe moving lights on the last four seasons of The Voice and once again they were at the core of the design with 18 x Pointes, 27 x miniPointes 24 LEDBeam 1000s, 8 x LEDWash 800s, 12 x LEDWash 600s and 34 x LEDBeam 100s plus 16 x CycFX 8s.
For the final, an additional 16 MegaPointes were brought in and positioned on the floor, in an upstage line to widen the enlarge the space. “They have a great zoom, the CMY colour mixing is awesome and an infinite amount of variations can be produced when it comes to effects - and that’s what we need given the intensity of the schedule and the amount of songs we light each week.”
Josh was assisted by his associate Andre Siebrits, and they programmed and ran the Robes and other lights on a grandMA3 console.
(Jim Evans)

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