With gear decisions looming, its coming time to make decisions as to some of the tools that are going to go into the festival light plot. I was trying to stay away from moving light solutions. However, since the last production meeting, it has become clear to me that we will need some kind of moving light solution if for no other reason than to accommodate all of the musical acts we will be hosting as part of the festival. Because of the nature of programming for the festival it may be impossible to know what musical acts will sign on until very close to performance time. This being the case, I will have to set looks for these musicians during their sound check. That alone is reason enough for even a basic moving light solution.
Couple that with several sponsor-supported parties that are now included in the festival and the necessity of a moving light solution has become even more apparent. The issue I am having now is given the limited budget of the festival how many moving lights will I be able to rent for the 5 weeks of tech and performance? And now incorporating the movers will make the ETC Express 48/96 an impossible option for tech, given that we are talking about teching 8 shows in 3 days. I am open to suggestions on this one. So any readers out there that come across this, I would ideally have 8 movers in the plot Martin 2000 series comes immediately to mind, but hopefully those and a console won't blow up the budget.
Thoughts?