The Gang’s All Here

If you don’t know your dibs from your dobs then here’s the skinny on the Melbourne Gang Show: Descended in a direct line from the original London production in 1932, the Melbourne Gang Show has been providing a platform for artistically and technically-minded Scouts and Guides to show off their wares since 1953. While the show is essentially a non-professional production, a quick glance at the technical team and five minutes watching the show, reveals that there’s nothing ‘Amateur’ about the technical elements happening of this production.

Technical Director David McKinnon of CVP – who also doubled as the AV Designer – explains the way the production team came about: “We actually have to pay a show fee to be involved; so all the members of the team donate 100% per of their time. It’s really all about providing a chance for some of the technical kids to see what they can do on a large complex production.”

SCOUTING OUT NEW FRONTIERS

Each year, the technical team focus on raising the bar in one of the technical areas, and this year it was clearly the audiovisual. In the opening scene, the main character, ‘The Facilitator’, is placed centre stage while his image is projected onto the scrim in front of him, a screen behind him, onto smaller screens fixed to the rotating staging, and displayed on four flown plasma screens. A Sony DSR-PD170 rigged on the first lighting bar and mounted on a remote pan/tilt head supplied the image for the media server.

Throughout the show both recorded and live streams were shown on many projection surfaces. An offstage green screen booth, equipped with a GY-JVC HM100E SDHC camera, provided a live feed to the media server for use in on-the-fly chroma-key effects.

McKinnon chose AV Stumpfl’s Wings Platinum 4 media server to drive his sophisticated AV design. In addition to these two live camera feeds, video elements included some stock footage, some footage recorded specially for the show, and some custom animations created by CVP. 

In terms of outputs, there were eight projectors ranging from 12,000 ANSI lumens to 3000 lumens and four 50-inch plasma screens. The Wings Platinum system was capable of four simultaneous, independent output streams, and through the judicious use of optical shutters on the projectors, was able to have multiple devices share media server outputs. 

The projectors on the three rotating scenic trucks received their video inputs via Gefen VGA-over-UTP devices, while all other projectors and the plasma screens ran RGBHV. The live camera feeds were run over HD-SDI. All devices on the system were controllable over an Ethernet network, so that the individual devices could have been controlled remotely had the Wings Platinum system failed. The network also had a wireless component which meant it could all be done via an iPhone had the worse case scenario eventuated. Thankfully, the system and equipment, all donated by CVP, worked flawlessly.