Rhythm & Alps

Kiwi lighting designers get to work, and TomTom Productions sets the stage for homegrown talent to show what they’ve got

(Photos by Kate Roberge Photography)

Against a backdrop of cancellations and postponements, Rhythm and Alps went ahead, seeing in 2022 with headliners Shapeshifter, L.A.B, Dom Dolla, and The Upbeats. A three-day festival with an audience in excess of ten thousand, TomTom Productions created a stage that allowed the predominantly Kiwi bands and their lighting designers to go to town, making the most of the first opportunity in a while to be part of something bigger than themselves.

From Doodles to Zig Zags

The concept for 2021 was developed as it is every year, in a series of doodles jotted down in TomTom Production’s Managing Director Hamish Roberge’s notebook, “Alex Turnball, Festival Director, leaves it to us. We both like to do things a bit differently and make the festival stand out, whilst still aiming to give the acts everything they want. We see it as a very collaborative event.”

For the last few years, TomTom’s Martin VDO Sceptron 20 has been the hero of the show but this year it was pre-booked for New Plymouth’s TSB Festival of Lights, unfortunately later scrapped due to COVID, “I was excited to develop something that didn’t rely on the Sceptron.” Hamish’s inspiration came from an Instagram boredom buster TomTom ran during lockdown asking followers to watch a compilation video from the last few years and vote for the stage they liked best, “An asymmetrical tunnel video design that we did for 2017 was a favourite so I set about achieving an asymmetrical look whilst also keeping it functional for the acts’ lighting designers. The challenge was to prevent it from looking too heavy on the one side.”

In the comments on Instagram, someone requested ‘pizzazz’ and the four ‘z’s got Hamish thinking. He came up with the idea of zigzags, battling the problem this posed for working the lighting rig, “We couldn’t put trusses underneath because that blocked the truss border video streams, so we played around a lot before we finally found something that looked good and was practical. I think because we supply both the video and the lighting it gives us a bit more flexibility and means we can create something that is unique. No one’s going to be offended if we put the video on the lighting truss.”

For video, Hamish used his new VuePix AR5 screens that he bought in early 2021 at huge emotional and financial expense, “The factory missed the boat due to the transistor shortage so I had to air freight half of them over at a huge cost in time for Snow Boxx as there was nothing else available in South Island. Then Snow Boxx was cancelled. The first half typically arrived on the day we went into Level 4 lockdown, and the second arrived the first day we got back into the warehouse so that was a whole heap of money down the drain for no benefit, but what could I do? Thankfully Rhythm and Alps meant we finally got to use a decent quantity.”

TomTom also got to play with their new camera system and camera chains for the first time with live onscreen IMAG provided for L.A.B. who use a disguise server and real-time rendering in Notch to run their show. Lastly Hamish threw in a twelve metre, forty percent transparent screen in on the overhead truss to create a zig zag effect.

Over to the Lighting Gurus – and a Nod to SLAB

Hamish was pleasantly surprised by the response of the acts’ lighting and video designers, “In previous years designers with international acts haven’t had the time to explore all our extras. This year though the headliners’ production teams were really keen to play around with ideas and see what they could do with what we had put together. They were really creative, even using the overhead screens as lighting fixtures. It was a highlight for me to watch six touring lighting designers spending an evening together ripping ideas on what they could do with the stage design.”

Why this extra creativity Hamish can only ponder, “Being mostly Kiwis and a tightknit community maybe? It seemed as if everyone was really excited to be able to do a festival. It meant something to us all and we wanted to push the boundaries and produce something really special.” They possibly had a bit more time too, “We sent them the 3D version in advance, and they may have had a bit more time at their end to plug it in and do some pre-programming.”

Hamish was somewhat surprised, with less international acts, to be faced with the most complex specifications he has had on all the festivals to date, “Kiwi acts have bumped up their requests for tech over the last couple of years. It’s definitely the most lights we’ve ever used on the floor.”

In addition to Hamish’s appreciation of the level of collaboration and creativity, the other festival highlight was of a more practical nature, the new stage. SLAB in Christchurch had refined the stage making it taller and more user friendly with a huge dock out back creating far more space to manage changeovers, “They took the bull by the horns and spent the dollars to make the festival better for everyone. It was choice.”

Wishing a Festival Into Existence Can Work

The end result was a three-day festival that ran like clockwork, even with a last minute curveball. Sampa the Great’s replacement, DJ Dimension, (Sampa having being caught up in the Omicron outbreak in South Africa), pulled out at the last minute as the result of a positive COVID test, along with close contact DJ Friction. A day before the festival was due to kick off, Fat Freddy’s Drop were signed on leaving Hamish with a twenty-four hour turnaround before picking up the backline from the airport, “We had to be very creative with what we had left, and cater for some movement in the line-up.” But that’s live entertainment in a pandemic.

TomTom Productions had a tough 2021 and they and Queenstown needed Rhythm and Alps. With a predominantly corporate client base, when Auckland went into lockdown TomTom saw ninety percent of their bookings cancelled, only left with a minor few hybrid events, “We are so dependent on Auckland for the client, or the audience, or for the acts.”

Perhaps most devastating of all was seeing Snow Boxx scheduled for mid-September fall by the wayside. Legendary in Europe, the snow festival was set to bring a combination of DJs and parties to the Southern Hemisphere for the first time, “Right up until mid-August when Auckland went into lockdown, I had felt confident that we were going to be OK for Snow Boxx. They’d only booked Kiwi artists so even when the bubble with Australia closed we weren’t impacted, and it seemed to me that the government was managing the small outbreaks. How wrong was I?”

Hamish and TomTom regrouped and he openly admits that he was hanging out for Rhythm and Alps, “After all that we went through, I think I was just wishing Rhythm and Alps into existence. It meant so much to everyone that we pulled it off.”

The Gear

Lighting

Spots – 16 Clay Paky Mythos 2

Wash – 12 Clay Paky HY B-EYE K15

Accent – 24 Martin Mac 101

Video

VuePix AR5 screens

Special Mentions

Those lighting designers:

Kora – Brock Coddington

LAB – Jack Hooper 

Tali – Stefaan Simons

Montell – Jade Fraser

Fat Freddy’s Drop – Filament Eleven 11 

Salmonella Dub – Steve Jarden

Shapeshifter – Matt King

Dom Dolla – Eliot Jessep

and

Sarah Edwards, Vibrant – in-house designer and FOH technician