Leading international dance brand GODSKITCHEN brought their hugely successful 2009 world tour show to South Africa, headlined by Armin van Buuren and staged at two amazing events in Johannesburg and Cape Town.
Gearhouse South Africa supplied full technical production for the Cape Town event for their client Kilowatt AV, headed by Dillon Jearey, all working closely with international production manager and lighting designer, UK-based Simon Barrington of Production Eye and project manager Andrea Frey from Angel Music.
Kilowatt has worked on previous GODSKITCHEN events, but this is the first time they have involved Gearhouse - whose Cape Town branch supplied staging and structure, lighting, audio and AV for the event at Bellville Velodrome, which was enjoyed by 4000 dance enthusiasts.
Gearhouse's 15 site crew were led by project manager Theo van As.
Structures
At the hub of the 2009 GODSKITCHEN show is the Boom Box, built with a latticed framework of Layher scaffolding which was then clad in white material optimised for projected visuals. All the DJ action took place in a window cut into the centre of this, flanked by two dance podiums.
It took a lot of careful pre-planning to get it bang-on. Kilowatt and Gearhouse received drawings in advance from Barrington, and it was particularly crucial that the diagonal struts were millimetre perfect as they needed to line up with the projected visuals.
Gearhouse also built two VIP platforms in the Velodrome, one measuring 24 x 16 m and the other 22 x 14m
Audio
The sound system needed to be pumpingly loud and have clean, clear coverage throughout the space, so they chose an L'Acoustics V-DOSC PA comprising 12 V-DOSC elements a side, flown, with 16 SB28 subs ground stacked. For monitors, 6 dv-DOSC speakers with 2 dv-Subs were provided. Systems engineer was Nathi Ntuli from Gearhouse's Johannesburg office and Bjorn Fielding from Cape Town. The console was a Yamaha 01V digital desk.
Gearhouse also supplied a full DJ set up according to the GODSKITCHEN spec, which included 4 pioneer CDJ1000s and one DVJ1000, with Pioneer DJM 800 and 700 mixers. Additional kit included a Pioneer EFX1000 digital effecter.
Lighting
The majority of the lights were rigged on and in the boom Box, with two additional trusses flown over the two VIP decks and another 2 over the dancefloor.
Twenty-Two Martin Professional MAC 2K profiles adorned the Box - the original spec was for MAC 700s, but Barrington and his team were more than happy with the brighter alternatives! Other lighting in the Boom Box included 16 Atomic strobes, and 16 linear 4-lite Moles. Six i-Pix Satellite LED bricks were used to illuminate the DJ and dancer positions.
Spread out across the audience trusses were another 12 MAC 2K profiles and 12 MAC 2K Washes, with 8 MAC 250s along the VIP trusses.
Lighting for the VIP areas was controlled by an Avolites Pearl 2008 supplied by Gearhouse, run by Willy Bothma.
Everything on the Boom Box and audience trusses was hooked into Simon Barrington's Chamsys console, which he operated for the show.
Video
For the Boom Box projections, Gearhouse supplied 4 Christie 16K Roadster projectors. These were double-stacked and mounted on their own 5 metre high scaffolding platform. The show visuals were run by Ed Shaw of Ne1co using customised Mac-based software from Exyzt.
Five Sony PD170 cameras were in predetermined locked-off positions on the boom box, 3 focussed on the DJ and the other two on the dancers, their feeds routed back to the computer running all the GODSKITCHEN visuals. Barrington output these to two Christie LX650 projectors which beamed the images onto two 12 x 9 side screens left and right of the Boom Box. The IMAG camera mix was created by Roland Sweet, from SA-based Little Big Productions, who has worked on previous GODSKITCHEN projects in the country.
Gearhouse also supplied all necessary rigging and power needed to facilitate the event's production elements.
GODSKITCHEN Cape Town was a great production achievement and everyone was ecstatic with the results, "There was some superlative teamwork between all of us - Kilowatt, Simon and the GODSKITCHEN crew and everyone working for Gearhouse - who all made it work seamlessly. It's a great way to work,”states van As.
Dillon Jearey from Kilowatt adds, “It was an absolute pleasure working with the Gearhouse Team, especially Theo and thank you all for making our event a huge success".
Simon Barrington concludes, "The Cape Town show was an absolute blinder, and Ed and I reckon it was the best ever. I was blown away by Gearhouse - a really nice crew, we got the kit we specified and more, it was in really good condition and absolutely streets ahead of what anyone else has supplied during the tour!”