Popular Music Competition

The PMC stands for the Popular Music Competition and is the annual music competition for Twyford and was the last PMC I will ever do. I’ve been lucky enough to design and program the lighting rig for the past three years. Since this was my final year I wanted to go out with a real bang and try and make this the best PMC there has ever been. Since I’ve been designing the PMC, each year the budget for it has been increased slightly due to more and more people turning up. I’m hoping this will continue to be the case when I leave. As per usual for the PMC, I designed a few different rigs so that we had options depending on what the budget was. I started designing the rig over the summer so I did not have any indication of what the budget may be.

The first design I created had massive trusses spanning the front wings of the stage area. Every year we always have a square stage with curtains that hide the wings. I wanted to make the stage look bigger by adding curved trusses to the side of the stage and have the curtains wrap around them. This would allow for a wider stage and viewing area. Further back is another set of curved trusses and directly behind the truss would be a curtain to hide the wings and allow the stage team to store equipment and the actors before they go on stage. The bars at the back, seen in the WYSIWYG screenshot, were Enttec pixel bars and the spaces in between them were for 0.9m x 0.9m projection panels. The pixel bars and the panels would have been mapped to become a segmented video wall.

Below is another version of the design above.

The second design involved having 4 vertical trusses to create a steam punk or industrial looking stage, which would be helped by stage design and projection. The vertical trusses would have housed 8 spots, 4 washes and 4 projectors within them. In the design I added two different types of spots, one type along the top of the trusses and the other along the bottom. For the top spots my criteria was that they had to have a wide zoom. I wanted to store 1 projector in each truss because I wanted to emulate a laser. I didn’t want to have proper lasers in the rig because at the end of the day it might not have been me who would be controlling them, and I didn’t want the students to have the possibility to accidentally direct a laser in someone’s eye. Projectors seemed like a good alternative and you could happily scan the crowd with them without the risk of injury. On the very top of each tower were 2 Elidy-S Panels for effects and a back light.

The final design, and the one I ended up taking forwards, was priced in the middle between the other two designs. The idea was to have a 2m grid filled with a 5×5 matrix of Ayrton magic dots-r. I wanted to do a matrix of pixelmap-able lights because I had ideas to use them as part of the video wall. Either side of the drum riser are two 3m trusses hung at roughly a 30 degree angle. 3 Ayrton magic blades-r, two Chauvet Rouge R2 Spots and two Martin 3000 LEDs were hung from it. There were also three scaffold poles either side, one 2m, another 2.5m and the final one was 3m – and all of these had a Chauvet core 3×1 and a Showtec sunstrip clamped onto it. In between all of the LED fixtures that were in the design, I wanted to use some warm tungsten lamps to add both warmth but also the dimming curve of tungsten is a lot nice for the slower and delicate songs. The sunstrips also look amazing on low intensity. Around the stage were different fixtures, ranging from Chauvet Colorados to Martin Mac series and Coemar Infinity Washes, washing the performance area.

All of the hired lights, minus the sunstrips, were hired from NegEarth. The trussing, rigging, power, DMX components and sunstrips, all came from Hawthorns. I ended up hiring enough power and 5Pin DMX so that we wouldn’t have to use our equipment for the hired fixtures. This made it very easy and quick to pack away. While designing the rig I also worked out the power consumption for each part of the rig and where it would get it’s power from. With help from the events manager at Twyford, Richard Bland, we also designed a safe system to hang the trusses from the girders in the roof of the performance centre.

For video, the plan was to have a large panel either side of the grid and 4 panels in-between the gaps of the sunstrips, due to time constraints only two panels were made by the video team. I had brought in my desktop to run Resolume which would output to the projector. The video team unfortunately ran into a few issues with Resolume which meant that we could not use it for the PMC. Although we could not project backgrounds, this did not stop us recording the whole event for future promos.

For me, the best part of the PMC was to be able to see what it feels like running a lot more fixtures then I normally use and I found that if you’re not use to that fixture count then time can run away when programming them. It was also amazing to be able to fly the grid and trusses from manual chain hoists. We added rigging points from the girders in the roof which the chain hoists attached to. This was amazing to be able to have hanging structures and definitely set the bar high for next year when the Techs program and design it. Although this PMC was great to design and program, I did learn that you shouldn’t have a rig full of beam lights. The PMC rig was heavily focused on beam lights and there weren’t that many spots. We had 6 Chauvet Rouge Spots but due to the way they were rigged they couldn’t reach the placed I wanted and weren’t in sync with each other. This has been a great learning experience because I’ve learn’t how important spot fixtures are and how they break up the stage and easily give different looks.