"There is a demand to buy more gear because the word has gone out quickly and I'm doing a lot of work," he said. "Sometimes it feels unreal, if I can put it like that. I feel blessed because as you know it's a tough industry, the competition is high and I thank God that I still have the business."
Because it's a small company, Kgomotso is there for every event, from set-up to strike, the first one in and the last one out. "My family give me support", he says, and he will always be grateful for his mom, a nurse, who has been an encouragement in his life. He is proud of his new little family too and tries to spend every free moment with his one-year-old son.
While Kgomotso usually hires in lighting gear from MJ Event Gear or Blackmotion Production, he hopes to gradually build up his own supply. He recently purchased Prolyte trussing and six Longman LED Par cans from DWR Distribution. He uses the trusses as lighting totems and they also work well for plasma stands. "I only use Shure microphones and one thing I did was brand them, so on television you could see our company name. It worked out very nicely because everyone called me after that live shoot."
Kgomotso is no stranger to the industry and is a well-respected, soft spoken and a hard working individual. He enrolled for IT tuition when leaving school, but left the course two years later to study music. "I am a drummer, and played music. I used to help a lot of artists setting up the band, backline and so on. I then left my music studies and joined TUT's Performing Arts Technology course, initially to do stage management. There I found out that there's actually lighting, sound and props and the course was bigger than just stage management."
While at TUT, he met up with Mark Gaylard from MGG Productions and freelanced for him over weekends working on events like KKNK or the Grahamstown Festival. "When I had completed my course, MJ Event Gear gave me the opportunity to do my practical there. That's where I furthered my lighting and technical knowledge. After that I went to Gearhouse South Africa, starting off in the audio department. MGG in turn helped me to understand everything from lighting to sound and AV."
(Jim Evans)
