Robe helps Play It Forward with Oooth
- Details
The broadcast - on YouTube and Facebook Live - also included interviews, features and panel discussions, and was staged at SA rental company MGG’s Studio B facility, one of two such facilities at their HQ in Johannesburg, complete with a full Robe lighting rig.
Reaching around 6,000 fans, whilst Play it Forward was airing, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa announced that the following day tattoo artists and studios would be able to re-start their businesses. On hearing this news, they in turn made a collective decision to donate the proceeds to #FeedOurCrew, an NGO which is providing basic needs and essential relief for event industry freelancers whilst large gatherings and shows are still banned.
MGG’s Johannesburg Studio B is the largest of the two at around 16 x 16 metres – allowing for a good amount of social distancing - and has been set up in their structures warehouse since the lockdown, as the company has reorganised and re-purposed itself to deal with radical changes in its current business. With a decent amount of headroom, it has been producing streamed rock shows since SA instituted level 3 lockdown on 1 June.
MGG’s resident lighting technicians Sipho Kekana and Hein Ströh worked together to design the lighting for both Johannesburg studios (MGG has a third at its Cape Town branch), and their input included specifying the 50 x Robe moving lights.
It includes six of MGG’s new Robe Esprite Profile LED units with the transferrable engine, purchased just before COVID-19 brought the industry to a standstill, together with Pointes, Spiiders, Spikies, LEDBeam 150s, LEDWash 600s, DL4S Profiles, CycFX 8 and Tetra2 moving LED battens, all of which were picked for their versatility and multifunctionality. All of these are controlled via a grandMA2.
“There has been no better choice of light for us here than the Robe LED-based fixtures,” commented Sipho.
Studio B has four Canon HD camera kits installed to catch every angle, all mixed on a Barco FSN switcher with the band all utilising Shure PSM 1000 in-ear monitors engineered via a DiGiCo SD12 audio console in a totally separate control room together with a pair of L-Acoustics 108Ps for the reference mix.
MGG’s studio technical crews are working in ‘bubbles’ so they are fully COVID-19 compliant, and as with all employees and in fact anyone entering the building, there are regular temperature checks, social distancing imposed, compulsory mask-wearing and abundant sanitising facilities throughout.
As well as MGG supporting this fundraiser, Robe’s South African distributor DWR was proactive in the realisation of Play It Forward and has also been a keen contributor and supporter of Feed Out Crew.
(Jim Evans)
