Wine Machine began in 2016 as a boutique Music, Food and Wine festival. Since then it has hosted numerous events around the country traditionally hosted at wineries. It aims to offer patrons a premium music festival experience in picturesque locations with the opportunity to sample local wine and foods.
Wine Machine has been attended by hundreds of thousands of people at events of varying capacities since its inception. The 2020 season was cut short when initial government COVID restrictions came into place the day after its NSW Show at Roche Estate, coining it “The festival at the end of the world”.
Through the valiant efforts of the Wine Machine team, the opportunity arose to honour their Victorian and ACT ticket holders at shows hosted in March 2021 with production design and management provided by Oblique Productions.
Oblique Productions was born out of the Snow Machine (2020) production team, consisting of Nikita Miltiadou as production manager and Dane Boulton as draftsperson/production designer. Wine Machine Victoria was the inaugural event for Oblique Productions. As a concept, Oblique Productions aims to think laterally (obliquely) to navigate the various curve balls that is the events space, whilst championing strong execution and unique design.
Forefront Productions provided lighting, audio and video with Oblique Productions saying they were excellent to work alongside on this show.
“Their crew’s passion was clearly evident and their attitudes remained incredibly positive even after some long days to make these shows a reality,” commented Nikita. “Their gear was well maintained and their knowledge of it deep. A massive thank you to FFP for their work on these shows and mostly our account manager Rob Thorne who was personable to deal with at every stage of the process and who did a great job leading a crew who have excellent camaraderie and clear respect for his knowledge and leadership.”
AUDIO
The PA used was NEXO STM with varying numbers of M46 main modules and B112 bass modules hung side by side as the main arrays at each location. M28 Omni-Purpose modules filled the roles of down, lip in and out fill and delays whilst S118 Subs provided low end. Forefront stands behind their STM and their system tech Matt Wever demonstrated a thorough knowledge of its deployment, working hard to utilise NEXO Prediction and Smaart RTA on-site to deploy and tune the system. The result was a PA that sounded excellent and guest engineers noted its ability to communicate their mixes. ACT presented the unique challenge of nearly 40m of width between main hangs but the PA still provided excellent coverage and clarity throughout the site whilst adhering to the venue’s noise requirements.
Audio control for both shows was a mix of DiGiCo and Avid consoles. With an SD9/ S6L at FOH and SD8/Profile at monitors, both remain mainstays in the Australian touring circuit, ensuring guest engineers had a platform they were familiar with. The festival’s audio engineer Damien Weatherly worked with Forefront to deploy control on-site in a way that would be comfortable for guest engineers. Oblique also provided a custom dual touch screen Waves LV1 control solution for control of house and guest plug-ins.
This year with COVID restrictions afoot, coverage was key to ensure patrons seated, standing or picnicking across the expansive sites felt connected to the show and delays were essential in achieving this. Running AB systems and extra patch plates helped to ensure the tight changeovers due to COVID related restrictions on running times would not impede touring artists and techs.
House monitor and patch duties were taken up by Jake and Sam Smith of Forefront who did a great job ensuring our artists without touring crew were comfortable and that everything landed in the right spots for our guest engineers.
The majority of live artists chose to use their toured IEM rigs, for those without them and the DJs, Nexo PS15s were provided as floating wedges with M46/S118 as side-fill and PS15/S118 as the texas headphones DJ Rig.
House wireless was Sennheiser 2000 units, festival engineer Damien Weatherly selected mics for all the house bands experimenting to find the best setup across the shows.
LIGHTING
The aim of this lighting design was to design one package that would create depth and fill the expansive space on the 20m Clifton’s Apollo structure in Victoria, whilst still translating well into the limited rigging capacity and trim height of Stage 88 in the ACT.
The most notable set pieces are the large “Wine Machine” RGBW Acrylic letters hung on either side of the stage in both states. These were built by STBY. GO in Melbourne and have toured with the festival for several years. They look great glowing against the night sky and filling the space on either side of the stage.
The lighting rig consisted of Martin MAC Viper Profiles, Martin MAC Quantum Profiles, Martin RUSH MH11 Beams, Robe Spiiders, Chauvet R1FXBs, Atomic 3000s, Octa Strobe RGBs, Elation DTW700 Blinders and Martin Jem Foggers / Look Solutions hazers.
“We went with a standard three truss overhead rig to keep Showfile adaptation easy for guest LDs,” added Dane. “For the floor package, we did a centre section of strobes, moles, beams and moving bars to fill the area underneath the USC LED and angled pods on each corner of the stage made up of Quantum Profiles and strobes, with the rear pods elevated on cases to create some big fan looks and fill out the extremities of the stage.
“The Viper remains a mainstay profile unit and perfect for this sort of application. The Spiider is my favourite wash unit at the moment providing a powerful wash, a great tight beam look and the flower look for some eye candy. The MH11s 250W lamp gives it a lot of punch even in the daytime. The look of the Xenon Atomic 3000 is still unmatchable and pairing it up with the Octa Strobe RGB meant LDs coming from LED strobes such as the JDC-1 or Solaris Flare could clone each element to the two units. The DTW Blinder is also a fantastic LED Blinder, the addition of an amber LED chip beautifully simulates the red shift of a classic tungsten source.”
House consoles were MA Lighting grandMA2 full-size and light, plus Hog4 + Playback wing. Both platforms were merged via Art-Net to provide a smooth changeover experience. House LD Dion Prassad of Forefront operated a fantastic show for acts without touring LDs with lots of eye candy to make the most of the rig during the day.
For both shows, the video element comprised of a large USC Centre LED Wall made up of Tekken T5 Panel. With regular COVID safety messaging an essential piece of the festival’s COVID Safe Plan in Victoria, there were two portrait screens on either side of this main wall which could be used for both artist content and be dedicated to COVID Safety messaging when required. For this, Pixapanel E3 Panels were chosen as its smaller pitch provided good clarity for text in the safety messaging.
“In the ACT where rigging was more limiting we kept the USC wall and added IMAG screens on scaffold either side of the stage made up of Vuepix ER4 provided by Elite Event Technologies,” said Dane. “We also added three trailer LED Screens provided by Epower Media to ensure patrons in our picnic area towards the rear of the site still had a great view of everything on stage. Both the IMAG and trailer LED Screens were used to display a fantastic camera mix by camera director Paul Simpson and COVID Safety messaging.”
The biggest challenge of this gig was taking on board the additional responsibilities of the COVID safe plan and the requirements of the health department in each state, and doing everything possible from a production perspective to assist in the execution of this plan. The uncertainty in approval of COVID plans leads to everyone from production suppliers to catering companies trying to mitigate cancellation, wastage and on-paid wages which are non-recoupable.
“The gigs were fantastic and it was unreal to be back to a festival format show with dancing permitted,” concluded Dane. “It was incredibly rewarding to see the punters enjoying their favourite artists in this format again and it was wonderful to see many industry personnel and friends reconnecting after more than 12 months off the road.”
Visiting Crew
North East Party House
FOH: Tom Moore
Monitors: Travers Chesney
LD: Mike Mcdonald
Jungle Giants
FOH: Antho Mathews
Monitors: Nathan Coleman
LD: Steve Granville
Lime Cordiale
FOH: Adam Haynes
Mons: Grady Henshaw
LD: Rob Charles
Peking Duk
LD: Aiden Toothil
Photos: Pat Stevenson
