Francesco Romagnoli, Clay Paky area manager for North and Latin America, comments: "This is a very high profile and exciting event to be involved in and we're proud to be a part of it. The Solomon Group is a very talented company and we're proud to be working with them."
"With great some support from VER, Solomon Group supplied gear to several stages, including five in the Mercedes-Benz Superdome, two in the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center and one in Woldenberg Park," says Matt Foucheaux, senior production manager at Solomon Group.
He deployed 65 chrome Clay Paky Sharpys for the Main Stage at the Superdome, which he says looked striking against the black truss that Solomon Group utilised onstage. "We built vertical columns between the LED screens and hung Sharpys inside of them to create the ability to show some really powerful aerial beam looks," he says. "We also hung some above the IMAG screens, which were programmed at times to rake would go out into the audience."
"We used a total of four grandMA2s" says Matt Foucheaux. "The Main Stage at the Superdome had two grandMA2 full-size units accompanied with two fader wings. Both the Center Stage and the Empowerment Experience Stage in the Convention Center had grandMA2 Lights."
Foucheaux and festival programmer, Ryan Stumpp, built many presets that would help the guest designers. Since there was such limited time to programme, it helped for these designers to come in and have a good amount of presets in their back pocket. "All of our NPUs and networking for the main stage was behind the stage which was around 350', so we utilized a fibre network to carry all 22 universes of data."
(Jim Evans)
