Jands Vista In Total Control At The Port Fairy Folk Festival

Australia's "world famous" independent music festival presents major international and national folk, trad and roots music artists during a four day festival of folk, country, Celtic, blues, jazz, bluegrass, traditions, contemporary, singers, songwriters, acoustic rock and world roots music.

Geelong-based Total Events provided lighting, staging, transport, rigging and AV requirements for the festival across six venues. 2011 was the 35th year of Port Fairy Folk Festival and Total Events managing director Scott Parker has provided various levels of production to the event for over fifteen years.

Lighting consisting of approximately one hundred LED fixtures, fifty moving head fixtures and a hundred dimmer channels plus operators, was supplied for four of the venues which were all controlled by Jands Vista with combinations of I3, S3, S1 and M1 consoles.

“Having the same control platform across all venues meant easy transitions for relief operators who had to fill in on all four venues,” commented Scott. “It also meant easy file management for creating and distributing show files and backups. Use of Vista meant controlling the different types and brands of fixtures was simple.”

According to Scott, all systems performed flawlessly over the seven days onsite, with temperatures and conditions fluctuating significantly, as often happens in seaside towns.

“We’ve been a long time user of Vista and when it came to a choice of console to put into every venue, there was no discussion to be held,” stated Scott. “Operators that were new to Vista had no issues becoming comfortable within a few hours of programming, resulting in lightshows that were always fitting to the diverse range of music presented at the festival.”

All dimming was Jands, using HP and the new HPC ‘Air Gap’ dimmers running in combinations of dimmer and 240v distribution mode for the moving lights.

“The HPC dimmers are new to our hire stock but will soon be the only dimmer and 240v distribution we stock due to their versatility,” added Scott.