AliceFor the third year in a row, Entec Sound & Light supplied full production, including crew, lighting, sound and video for the ‘Roar With Laughter’ fundraiser event staged by ZSL (the Zoological Society of London) at the Hammersmith Eventim Apollo.
The fundraiser’s line up included Sean Lock, Seann Walsh, David O’Doherty, Ed Byrne, Stewart Lee, Lucy Porter, Phil Nichol and Greg Burns.
Entec invited Simon Tutchener to create a lighting scheme for the evening.
“It was a great show for a worthwhile cause and I thoroughly enjoyed working with all the Entec team as usual,” comments Simon, explaining how he lit the show, while Adam Stevenson dealt with all the lighting elements from the office end.
The rig was straightforward, comprising a front and back truss – however the placement of fixtures needed to be precise and appropriate for comedy, where the most important focus is on the funny-person onstage.
Eight bars of six PARs were divided equally between the two trusses with six Clay Paky QWO 800 moving lights rigged on the back and two on the front.
The rear fixtures provided back beam looks and gobo work on the stage floor, while those on the front truss were fitted with custom ZSL gobos, which were projected onto the upstage screen.
Eight Vari*Lite VL2000s were used for additional front washes and two follow spots were positioned each side of the balcony.
Simon programmed and ran the show on a grandMA2 light – his console of choice – through which he also triggered the video cues.
Simon worked on site with Entec’s lighting crew of Tom Crosbie and Pepper (Pete Schofield).
Meanwhile, Will Wright took care of the projection elements which comprised two Barco R10+ machines – main and backup – hung on the front truss and beamed onto a screen flown upstage of the back truss.
Will programmed a Hippo Critter media server with the content, including graphics and some VT footage – supplied by ZSL. This was networked with the grandMA2 desk.
The sound system was specified by Entec’s Mark ‘Magic’ Ellis-Cope, based on his and systems engineer Lee Furnell’s extensive knowledge of the venue acoustics and the genre of comedy performance.
Taking care of the audio was a d&b Q1 series system with 10 Q1 speakers a side formed the main arrays with a total of 10 ground stacked Q-Subs, augmented with four Q7 and four E3 in/out fills.
Two d&b E12s and four M4s served as wedge monitors with FOH engineer Adam Pendse mixing both FOH and monitors from his Midas Pro1 console.
The artists used primarily Shure hand-held SM58 radio mics with a number of Countryman headsets, all running via an eight-channel Shure UHF-R system.
Adam and Lee were joined on the audio crew by Tom Olorenshaw, one of Entec’s new warehouse team.