Robe BMFLs at 2015 Metro FM Awards

	Photo: Louise Stickland.

The 2015 Metro FM Awards, held in Durban, South Africa featured a lighting rig with Robe BMFL Spots along with nearly 150 Robe moving lights, at the Albert Luthuli International Convention Centre.

Attended by 4,000 guests and VIPs, the evening, organized by one of the country's leading radio stations, was broadcast live on national channel SABC1 and saw the presentation of 20 awards and nine special live performance collaborations.

Coordinating all the technical elements was the firm Dream Sets. Robert Hoey, the Dream Sets project manager, worked for the third year for event producer Blue Moon. Francois van der Merwe, from the Wizardry Group, was the lighting designer. The 24 BMFL Spots were supplied to Dream Sets by MJ Event Gear, the first rental company in South Africa to invest in them. This was their first high profile show since MJ took delivery a few weeks beforehand.

The rig was a combination of gear from Johannesburg-based Dream Sets and MJ, with additional support from locally based Black Coffee.

van der Merwe was delighted to be the first LD in the country to use the BMFL Spots on a high profile live TV show and -- the first worldwide as far as we know at time of writing -- to use two BMFLs as followspots.

After completing the programming of over 500 show cues in three intense overnight sessions, the designer's reaction was, "They are completely amazing fixtures! You could quite easily have an entire rig just of BMFLs, and I will definitely be using them again whenever possible!"

His starting point for lighting the Metro Awards show was the set designed by James McNamara which comprised 30 scenic shards rigged asymmetrically around the stage, and a multi-level stage that stepped right down to audience level at the front. Three projection screens continued the gentle asymmetry upstage, the whole concept bringing a clean and contemporary visuality to the performance space.

The BMFLs were positioned on the 11 over-stage-and-audience sections of trussing and used extensively throughout the three-hour show for a mix of stage and audience washes and specials and also for texturing the floor of the set with gobo looks, which worked brilliantly for all the overhead camera shots.

"Using one type of very bright fixture, I could do all the beam and spot work and all the gobo effects I needed," explained van der Merwe, admitting that the BMFLs were so bright that, to ensure the lighting was balanced for the projection, he ran them at 40% for the entire show. In fact he did go to 100% once, when the lights were in a color-and-full-gobo look.

"They completely exceeded my expectations in every way," he said. "Seeing them in a demo room is one thing, but utilizing them in a show environment is something very different - that's when you really realize how bright they are, just how streamlined the color mixing really is, how beautifully flat the beam is right the way through the path, the finesse of the dimming curve, the incredible depth of focus -- even if you pull half focus on the gobo, the beam is still perfectly crisp."

Hoey first used four briefly as a beam effect on a show at the end of 2014, and this time he was able to see their full potential unleashed. "They are absolutely beyond my expectations" he said. "They will look great on all types of shows from stadiums and arenas to smaller concerts and events."

Both he and van der Merwe were keen to try them in followspot mode, so Robe's South African distributor DWR coordinated delivery of the custom followspot handles that can be fitted to the back of the BMFL Spot unit that allows it to be used as an extremely bright and very lightweight followspot.

Two BMFL followspots were mounted on underhung truss mount chairs, also supplied by MJ, on the advanced truss just above the front row of the audience.

With followspot mode selected, pan/tilt are disabled so the unit can be moved manually; all the fixture's other parameters - iris, intensity, colur mixing etc. -- were controlled through the grandMA 2 console. All the operators had to do was point the BMFL Spot in the right directions.

Van der Merwe and Hoey both selected "medium" from the three available traction modes that alter the physical handling of the BMFL in followspot mode.

He also used 120 other Robe moving lights on the rig. Seventy-two LEDBeam 100s were dotted around the production trusses and primarily used to light the set shards and for some beam effects. Eighteen LEDWash 800s above the stage formed the main back-light and also washed the stage areas. Sixteen ColorWash 2500E Ats were rigged on the trusses above the audience and used to highlight the crowds together with 16 ColorSpot 700s which textured and enhanced the audience looks. There were around 300 lights in the rig, including a few other movers, generics and strobes.

Hoey says, "We were very proud to help deliver another great Metro FM Awards and to be part of Blue Moon's production. The main challenge for technical was the tight time frame, and yet again, this galvanised some great teamwork between us and our technical partners, and energised some great experience, ingenuity and talent between all the disciplines."

Dream Sets constructed the set and provided the rigging and lighting design. The company brought in AV Unlimited to provide video hardware and Sound Harmonics, who supplied the excellent sounding L-ACOUSTICS Kara/Kudo PA.

Black Coffee also supplied lighting -- including more Robe moving lights -- for the VIP after party at the ICC Arena.