ANYMA

GENESYS, MELBOURNE

November 23, 2024, was a bit of a big deal for both EDM fans and AV nerds alike. The global phenomenon that is multi-disciplinary video and sound artist Anyma (a.k.a. Italian-American DJ and producer Matteo Milleri) was bringing his show Genesys to Australia for the first time. Anyma’s shows are famous for incredible immersive visuals, in which humans, technology, and nature fuse in a futuristic utopia, played out on the biggest canvases imaginable, including Las Vegas’ Sphere. Genesys promised to be the biggest deployment of a single LED screen for entertainment that Australia had ever seen.

Melbourne’s own WOOHAH got the brief to provide the LED screen at Flemington Racecourse for Genesys. “There was no brand, model, or size specified in the rider,” explains Arosh Fernando, Founder and CEO of WOOHAH. “It just asked, ‘how big can you go?’” The answer WOOHAH had to that question was very, very big indeed.

The screen that WOOHAH supplied and built was an incredible 40.2 metres wide and 19.2 metres high, running approximately 23.5 million pixels and weighing in at a whopping 33 tonnes for a single screen. “It was big,” understates Arosh significantly. “I’ve never seen 35,000 people take photos of a screen before.” Julian Ng, Lead Systems Engineer on the project, agreed. “Just to brace the screen from the winds, we had 200 linear metres of truss at the back of the screen. The joke on-site was that we had more truss than the lighting team, and they had around 800+ fixtures.”

The screen was built using ROE Visual Carbon Mark II panels on T4 frames, processed by five Brompton SX40s, fed from four Barco E2 controllers. Anyma’s content team ran their own Pixera media server (with WOOHAH’s custom built 4K Resolume server as a backup) and sent WOOHAH the signals, which got to stage via Riedel MediorNet MicroN UHD fibre optic transport.

The sheer scale of the screen was the single biggest technical challenge of Genesys, and the planning to build such an enormous structure started long before the event. “We started working on this nine months beforehand,” confirms Ben Nickel, Head of Touring at WOOHAH, who managed the overall project. “We worked with production, staging and technical management company Gig Control closely. Engineering and wind bracing for a structure this size was a massive undertaking, to ensure we were within the safety limits of the screen and structure.”

Gig Control put the package together for the promoters, Untitled Group. JPJ were doing audio, and the whole gig was part of Always Live Victoria. “Gig Control’s Nathan Aveling and Matthew Jens are the masters of putting the best of the best together. They knew they were pushing the boundaries and had both Cliftons Productions and Showtech Australia involved in staging and rigging. Showtech’s Tiny Good had a huge part in making sure this structure went up and stayed up safely.”

Weighing in at a stonking 33 tonnes, weight was a serious factor. “Engineering and safety, both in the build and event day management, were front and centre throughout the entire project. As well as 24 two tonne motors holding this bad boy together, each had a load cell attached to ensure it was lifting exactly as intended; nothing more, nothing less,” describes Ben. “As well as ensuring the motors loaded correctly during the build, the loadcells meant we could monitor the wind effect across the motor loads for the entire duration onsite, with the help of Dane Boulton, who oversaw rigging on behalf of Gig Control.”

The sheer weight and size meant both the bump-in and bump-out were carried out with military precision. “The screen went up in two days,” confirms Ben. “The process was meticulous, and needed to be to manage such a large screen surface in outdoor conditions. The screen itself was built within two days, and by the end of the second day, the screen was built, braced, and cabled. We were using the ROE Visual panels with their T4 Touring Frame. The frames sit in their dollies, you connect the dollies together, and then you lift one layer at a time. As it goes up, you shift the dollies, come down again, connect the next row, lift. The German production team noted that they hadn’t seen the touring frames used before because of the weight they add.”

All of this effort created a result so epic that it’s hard to capture in either images or words. “The pictures do not do it justice,” remarks Arosh. “It’s so hard to understand the scale, right?

When I’ve shown people photos, they’ve said, ‘That’s a nice screen,’ and I’ve had to zoom all the way in to show them a person on the stage to try and give some idea of scale. One of our staff members was flying into Melbourne Airport at night when the screen was on, and they said they could see the screen from the plane on the landing loop over Flemington.”

In one very technical and specific indicator of the scale of the screen, WOOHAH’s techs used the LED panel control software for something not normally possible. “A couple of the crew decided to write ‘WOOHAH’ using the status indicator lights on the backs of the panels,” chuckles Arosh. “It took me a minute, but then I realised just how many pixels of LED indicator that took.”

The sold-out gig also drew praise for its excellent sound. “Even people at the back were talking about how amazing the audio was, supplied by JPJ,” relates Arosh. “The German production team were very diligent in how they wanted to present the show to the audience. When extra tickets were put on sale, they added two more delay towers to the PA to ensure every punter had an excellent experience.”

The next stops for Anyma after Melbourne were presenting their show Afterlife in Abu Dhabi, and Tulum, Mexico. After that, Anyma returned to Sphere Vegas for their residency, The End of Genesys, which will run until March 2025. That Australian production can match the technical requirements of an audio visual artist at that global level is something everyone involved should be proud of.