The event was staged in the Coca Cola Dome in Johannesburg and at the Grand Arena at Grand West, Cape Town, with Gearhouse working through technical production company Lucidity for Brand Events SA, the official licensee for Top Gear Live in South Africa.
Gearhouse project manager Michael Lewis worked closely with Lucidity's Paul Newman, technical production manager, and the international Top Gear Live touring production team to ensure that sound, lighting, staging, rigging and 6000 seats (from Havaseat, also a Gearhouse company) were installed into the Dome to create the Top Gear Live arena.
Live arena lighting was designed by Steve Sinclair from the international Top Gear Live team, who worked alongside a Gearhouse Lighting team of 15, with Gearhouse's Sean Rosig as programmer and operator.
A star shaped truss design was flown above the arena, comprising a 6m ring and a 9m square truss with a diameter of approximately 12mwith nine 'fingers' coming off it. At the end of each finger was a vertically underhung 4ft section of A-type trussing, with moving lights stacked on top of one another.
There were a total of 114 moving lights on the rig, a mix of Robe ColorWash 700E AT, ColorSpot 2500E ATs and Robe ROBIN 300E Wash fixtures. There were also 23 Martin MAC 2000 Profiles, 16 Martin MAC 250 Entour and 4 Martin Atomic 3000 strobes. Show lighting was programmed and run by Rosig using a GrandMA full size console, with Steve Sinclair calling the cues and the 4 follow spots.
Audio was delivered via two main eight-element left and right V-Dosc arrays to cover the two seating stands which were at 90 degrees to each other, with a dv-Dosc hang in the middle for the VIP seats. L-Acoustics SB28 subs were hidden under the seats, in three separate clusters beneath each of the two stands, all time aligned to give a low end rumble of excitement and accentuate the "vrooom" of revving engines, all helping to ramp up the atmospherics.
Two 8m x 4.5m IMAG screens were flown either side of the main set, fed by two pairs of overlaid Christie 16K projectors.
(Jim Evans)
