The University of Melbourne Southbank, located in the heart of Melbourne’s Arts and Cultural precinct, is home of the Victorian College of the Arts and Melbourne Conservatorium of Music. The campus sits amongst the heritage-listed former Victoria Police Horse Stables. The VCA has been around for over half a century as the premier learning institution for artists, actors, theatre makers, film makers, dancers, classical and contemporary musicians, music theatre and production technicians to hone their craft before making their impact on the real world.
Back in 2022, the VCA purchased 2 identical GreenGo wireless systems to deploy on the student-run productions. We selected GreenGo as an industry standard system, that we could scale and integrate with our existing wired comms systems.
What features of the Green-GO system really fulfil the need?
The Green-GO system came in at the right price point and offered the features of systems that were double the price. Our student-led productions were regularly renting systems and using limited budget available that is better used to realise creative outcomes and design milestones. Having our own systems gave us control and ensures the maintenance is carried out to keep them in working order. The ability to combine our two rigs into one large rig is very useful, along with the ability to easily change user profiles and have several other parameters recall with the user profile makes the rig quick to deploy. End user customisation of talk groups, program level and other parameters means for me as the equipment coordinator, I don’t have to do this for the students, they can manage it themselves. Creating pools and being able to mesh access points for greater coverage has recently become a feature that greatly enhanced the outcome of a recent multi room production.
How does this system improve your workflow in what you do…..?
Once Event Comms created our configuration file based on what we thought we would need now and into the future, it was quickly loaded into each system and checked. We’ve made incremental improvements as we’ve used the system more, the original configuration file is still in place. This saved us so much time in getting the systems out on to productions rather than having to generate this in house. The systems now integrate seamlessly with our wired comms. The student stage managers, head electricians and mechanists keep their rehearsals and tech checks on time as they can communicate to each other as they work around the venues.
What do your users (techs) “say” about the system?
Our student technicians, along with the professional casual technicians, comment on ease of set-up and customisation of the beltpacks. I’ve spent time educating the users on the equipment, including its limitations, and once people understand what it can and can’t do, it helps them get the most out of it and use its full suite of features.
We’ve always had the highest level of support from Event Communications. When we’ve run into an issue we couldn’t resolve, a phone call or email to the team has been quickly actioned and kept us going and limited any downtime on production.
Photos: Gregory Lorenzutti
