Gearhouse South Africa at MAMA

Gearhouse South Africa transported their skills, knowledge and equipment to Nigeria to supply lighting, sound, AV, an LED screen and a crew of 25 to the MTV Africa Music Awards (MAMA) with ZAIN, staged in The Velodrome, Abuja.  It was the first in what is to become an annual MTV base event held in rotation in various African countries.

Gearhouse has an ongoing working relationship with MTV base in South Africa, so when the green light was given, MTV base turned to Gearhouse. The event was project managed for Gearhouse by Bill Lawford and Eyal Yehezkely.

Fifty tons of kit was air freighted from Johannesburg to Abuja and back in a chartered jumbo.

The lighting design was created by Ireland-based Johnny McCullagh, who produced an initial plot and spec from which the Gearhouse team worked, led by Lighting Crew Chief, Jason Fritz. Audience lighting was taken care of by Director of Photography, Eugene O’Connor.

The key design requirement of the rig was that it had to be flexible enough to accommodate a multi-artist line up which included Kelly Rowland, The Game, Flo Rida, Asa, Cassette, D’Banj, P Square, Jozi, Sean Anikulapo Kuti, HHP and others.

A 20m ground-supported goal post upstage created the main set supports, as well as entrances and exits, with some lights hung from it. All other fixtures were rigged either off the catwalks or on 8 m high vertical truss towers onstage.

The range of moving lights consisted of 54 x Martin Professional MAC 2000 washes and 36 x MAC 2000 Profiles, hung off the trussing and towers as well as covering the VIP entrance and front lighting the scrims. In addition, 36 x single PARs were distributed over the floor and the verticals.

For audience lighting, Gearhouse used 18 bars of 6 x PARs, 4 x 2K fresnels, 16 bars of ACLs, 24 x single PARs for front lighting and another 12 x single PARs for podium specials and washes. These were all hung from the catwalks over the auditorium.

Illuminating the VIP entrance was 6 x 2K Fresnels and 4 x PARs, and Gearhouse used 3 x Gladiator follow spots for FOH and 3 x 1.2K Strongs for truss spots.

Also used were 2 x Avolites consoles, a Diamond 4 to run the moving lights and a Pearl 2008 for managing the generics.

LEDVision supplied a 5 x 5 Lighthouse R16i/o LED Screen to back the presenter podium, which was fed by the Dimension TV OB truck.

The generators were sourced locally, and it proved quite a galvanising task to find a sufficient number of them that were up to the task of providing reliable power for the event and the rehearsals.