This was staged at Old Billingsgate Market, one of London's premium event venues. The evening featured a gala dinner for 500 guests, complete with charity auction, rounded off by a performance by Chic - headed by guitarist Nile Rogers. The event raised money for the charity, which supports additional educational initiatives encouraging children and young people to raise their achievement levels.
Renegade has worked closely with SHINE for the last eight years, producing all their live events. Each year for this special event, Renegade's Nick Gray comes up with a fresh and inventive visual theme for the evening.
The 2011 SHINE Benefit Dinner was project managed for Renegade by Mike Fidler, working with Nick Gray and Andy Cobb from Sculptivate who collaborated with Gray on the overall concept and co-ordinated the set and stage build.
The venue was divided into a two room format. Gray's lighting design for the dinner section on the west side, created an intimate feel. Renegade brought in drapes specialists Blackout to clad the walls, but leaving the impressive arches running down the sides of the room exposed and ripe for architectural highlighting.
To ensure the dinner setting had a real vibe and atmosphere, Gray suspended five pre-wired vintage lightbulbs - of varying large sizes and wattages - over each table, all with striking filaments, distinctive copper fabric cables and individual control. This brought a really magical illuminative touch to the room.
A 6mm high resolution LED wall was built in the middle of the dining room to show constantly updated results of the progress of the auction.
Six trusses were installed above the dining room, rigged with VARI*LITE V*L2500 Wash and Martin Professional MAC 700 Profile moving lights, which were used to skim the walls, floor and tables. The room columns and arches were up-lit with battery powered wireless LED units.
The band stage room (on the east side) also doubled as the reception for when guests arrived - transformed from one to the other by the production team in lightening quick time as guests enjoyed their dinner.
Integral to Gray's design were eight panels of white gauze hung above the stage, used for projection surfaces, fed with custom-created 1970's disco-tasic visuals and animation material for the band - which went down a storm! The projections were fed - via a Catalyst media server - to two 20K machines positioned on balcony level, supplied by XL Video.
A series of staggered drop bars from the trusses flown above the stage were positioned between the scrims, populated with 12 Martin MAC Auras, six Atomic strobes and 12 x 2-lite Moles attached to their ends, giving the stage a quirky look. Above, on the trusses themselves were V*L 2500 Spots and Clay Paky Alpha Wash 700 moving lights.
All the stage lighting was supplied by White Light and .operated by Trent O'Connor using a grandMA light and a Chamsys MagicQ consoles. Renegade crew chief Chris Fyfe co-ordinated the 7 lighting crew over two days of get in and rehearsals. Audio was supplied by Andrew Frengley of Matrix 9, and Blackout also supplied and did all the rigging.
(Jim Evans)
