Adam Beaumont, head of AC-ET's rigging sales division, James Bawn from the lighting division and Stuart Moots from the audio division co-ordinated the event, which involved their collective skills, experience and resources, plus some of the industry's leading rigging, lighting and audio products. The equipment was taken to the college for the day and set up a series of live interactive demonstrations in the purpose built Grange Arts Centre performance facility. Both Moots and Bawn are former students of the college.
The courses being studied are for Entertainment Technician and Stage Technician qualifications, and include modules on lighting & sound engineering.
Beaumont commented, "I was approached by BTEC Production Arts course tutor Dave Hughes about doing some training for the students, so we constructed a special half day presentation to run for 2 sessions covering some important aspects of lighting, audio and rigging."
With so much potential information to pack in, specific elements of each area were highlighted and presented in a lively and interesting manner, complete with hands-on examples with which the students could 'get live'. There was also the chance for in-depth Q&As.
The lighting section focused on LED products and technology, with Chroma-Q Color Force high output LED battens and Color Block 2 modular LED fixtures used as versatile examples. The sessions included the philosophy of LED lighting and how the technology works, the applications and the huge benefits - both for the creative imagination and the environment.
Audio centred on the technical and design differences and advantages of line array versus point source systems, and digital mixing. A Nexo Geo S12 line array system was assembled and flown on a portable VMB A220 PA tower, hooked up with a Roland M300 console, which was used to demonstrate the breadth and flexibility of digital mixing.
For Rigging, a Litec QX30S trussing goal post was built, and a session was devoted to truss theory.
(Jim Evans)
