The 21st Forth Valley Blues festival, Tasmania’s largest blues festival head lined by Mark Seymour (Hunters & Collectors fame) was recently held on the Forth Recreation Grounds. The Forth Valley Blues Festival is a community run event. The initial fundraising purpose of the event was to provide for facilities improvements to the Forth Recreation Ground which caters for the local football, cricket, and tennis clubs, and is the Festival site.
An important aspect of the local festival was the lighting of the stage for each performer and performance. Show Systems Australia have been the lighting production supplier for the festival for the past 4 years, Matthew Adams Director of Show Systems has handled the rig design and lighting design every year since Show Systems has been involved and was again contracted for this year’s event.
When deciding which lighting fixtures to implement for the festival, Matt decided to go with the trusted brand of fixtures he has used many times before with great success, CHAUVET Professional that were supplied by Showtools International. Matt decided to use 8x Maverick MK2 Spots and 1x Net X sACN or Art-Net-to-DMX node for the show.
Matt explained the challenge of lighting up the festival, “Given it’s a festival with 14 bands performing starting on the Friday night and then on the Saturday from 12pm to 12am, it’s always challenging to keep each band looking fresh and unique to their style and not Pidgeon hole yourself by recycling the same looks and dynamics repeatedly. Thankfully with the MK2’s armament of features there was always another trick up my sleeve.”
Matt positioned 4 of the Maverick MK2’s on the back truss with the remaining 4 on the mid truss all offset from each other to prevent overlapping & running via sACN. One highlight the MK2 Spot is the output of the fixture, “The Massive output of the Maverick MK2 Spot still surprises me, impressive grunt that makes delivery an impact easy with 440W LED engine,” Matt said. He continued, “The precise CMY colour mixing system to create a wide pallet of colors and the awesome aerial gobo’s all make the MK2 Spot perfect for creating the various looks that were essential for the different bands.”
The Forth Valley Blues Festival was a huge success for 2018 thanks in large part to the Maverick MK2 Spots and Net-X used by Matthew Adams of Show Systems Australia. Matt concluded, “Were always surprised by these fixtures, they always come up trumps no matter what challenge we throw at them, all whilst been easy to maintain and it’s actual nice to handle a fixture that actually feels well put together and isn’t made from materials that feel cheap.”
Photo credits: Tim Mclaren and Anne Ponsonby.
