Stunning Visuals for Now or Never from Novatech

Melbourne’s cutting-edge Now or Never festival promises “an exploration of potential futures through a carefully curated program of pioneering audio and visual art, performance, visionary thinkers, digital culture, and commissioned work.” Funded by the City of Melbourne, one of the highlights is the conversion of the Royal Exhibition Building in Carlton Gardens to a concert venue, with four nights of bold, loud, and totally unique musical performances.

This year, the shows included multi-instrumentalist Eartheater (USA), techno from Sandwell District (UK), producer Erika De Casier (Denmark), Melbourne-born and Iceland-based experimental musician Ben Frost, local Wiradjuri woman Naretha Williams, celebrated electronic musician Clark (UK), and Italian techno DJ Donato Dozzy playing a night co-hosted by Untitled Group.

Such an electric and eclectic programme needed inspiring and innovative visuals to go with it. Having acted as technical supplier at the REB’s first year of Now or Never, Novatech Creative Event Technology were again chosen by Production and Technical Managers Gig Control to supply audio, lighting, and video to the event, but with a brief to do something quite different visually.

Having tamed the acoustically challenging REB in 2023 with draping and an expertly deployed L-Acoustics PA, Novatech chose to roll out more or less the same system, with a couple of minor tweaks. Gig Control’s Nathan Aveling was in charge of all creative design, including lighting and video, and created a ‘spine’ for lighting that extended from above the centre of the stage, running down the length of the audience, covered in 66 GLP impression X4 Bar 20s, supplemented by trusses around the room running 44 Ayrton Perseo S IP65 moving heads. A further 24 GLP impression X4 Bar 20s were on upright truss.

With 2023’s visual highlight being an enormous ROE Visual Vanish LED screen, Nathan decided to go for something different; very different. “We started talking about going from LED to a projection-based design,” says Leko Novakovic, Managing Director of Novatech. “We have Wahlberg high-speed DMX controlled roll-down screens, and we discussed how we could use them. Nathan wanted to do both front and rear projection; the front could be doing backgrounds, and then the rear could be doing punchy overlays. And sometimes we could take away the screens completely and just blast the architecture of the room with projection.”

Nathan and Novatech agreed, and the design progressed. But Nathan had a design challenge for Novatech. “A roll-down screen works just like a blind in your house,” explains Leko. “You hang up a tube of material, then you tell it to go up and down. But Nathan said, ‘no, I don’t just want the screen to go up and down, I want the bottom of the screen to stay at stage level, and the top of the screen go up and down too.’ I knew it had been too easy up to that point!”

With some great input form Showtech Rigging, who are in-house at the REB, Nathan decided they could use Novatech’s Wahlberg DMX-controlled winches to in turn fly their roll-down screens in and out. ShowTex Australia helped Novatech source a projection surface that would look equally good being front and rear projected at the same time.

This incredible system allowed the screens to roll down the entire height of the vast REB, a total of twelve metres for both of the six metre wide screen surfaces. They could then move, grow, retract, change aspect ratio, and more, with projection, screens, and winches coordinated and controlled in real-time, allowing for astonishing projected effects.

The front projectors were six Barco UDM 4K22s, three per screen, rigged around 40 metres from the front. Rear projection was from four UDX 4K32s with two per screen, positioned around 12 metres behind. Two disguise 4×4 Pro media servers ran content, and could alter the projection canvas in real time in reaction to the screen movement. “We got the disguise servers talking to our grandMA3 lighting console, which was also controlling the Wahlberg DMX winches and the Wahlberg DMX roll-downs. The disguise coordinated with the screen movement, and sent a black mask as the screen dropped, so you wouldn’t see any projector overshoot.”

Credits:

• @nowornever.melb @cityofmelbourne
• @gig.control @jensway  – Production/Technical Management
• @gig.control and @lasersloth.vwx  – Production Designers
• @rhysnewling and @brendan.harwood  – Festival Visual Artists
• @showtechaustralia – Riggers
• @clifton_productions  – Structures
• Novatech – Lighting, Rigging, Projection, Automation, and Audio suppliers
• ShowTex Australia – fabric projection surfaces

Photos credit | Duncan Jacob