THE TEAM:
- Kaarel Tamra – FOH production and mix
- Eventech – PA/Backline and monitors
Öövalgel is a lighting festival in Pärnu, Estonia. The festival presents light performances to the audience, where stories are told through light and video projection. The performances are performed in the buildings and courtyards of Pärnu city center. Kerli´s Shadow Works show was a one-time special, created just for this festival.
Kaarel’s thoughts:
This was an epic show. It was a lighting festival and mr Argo Valdmaa was the head organizer and did most of the visuals. He had an idea to do a Kerli special show and find an interesting location for that. The location was a very cool looking schoolhouse and schoolyard in Pärnu, Estonia. Argo used the structure of the schoolhouse to project visuals onto and the idea was to put Kerli to perform in front of that.
That meant we had to keep things neat, including speaker towers. Argo wanted to people see the whole lighting show, the whole projected area on the building from the audience perspective, not the speaker towers and stage structures. The second acoustical challange was that the schoolyard is not deep, it is wide and a bit random shaped. And you have the back building slapping back. So we planned to put the PA towers to the corners of the building and the left and right towers were different in setup, because the area was really not parallel. (see the picture of the audience area). Eventech was our partner with the PA solutions and they did a very good job calculating and drawing out everything beforehand.
Kerli is an extraordinary person and an artist and she´s always challanging herself and everybody around her. She has really cool ideas and very much of her show setups are custom made. This time for example, there was a rotating part of the stage (manually operated by the “wolves” – masked actors, who really couldn´t see too well through the masks), there was an elevator (a forklift hid into the stage actually), which rised her ca 3-4 metres. She changed costumes, she was in a cage, she went into the schoolbuilding and sang one song inside the schoolhouse, behind the window. So you can imagine there are no two same vocal processings and the mic really had to be open only! when she really sang, because she was doing a lot of action there. I had to program it so that every scene started with vocals muted. And every song ended with the vocals muted even before the music stopped, because she was already crawling somewhere, running somewhere, changing costumes etc. 🙂
Of course all the show had to be in timecode. I used the small Cymatic Audio LP16 backtrack player, which is really reliable, to play all the backing tracks and audio timecode for video and lights. I still was a bit scared to let the cymatic audio change the scenes in the Midas Pro desk automatically (however that works neatly with MIDI), I wanted further control and to be in the scene a bit earlier than when the song started (remember, this is a one off show and all the components really got together the first time at the actual show).
However, Midas Pro1 then gave out midi signal to UAD live rack to change scenes automatically.
Every song had a different scene and in some cases, some choruses and verses had also different scenes). Kerli´s vocal sounds and effects vary a lot. During the show I was reading the script and my notes, trying to follow everything. I also was the one hitting play for the backtrack. So I had to make sure, Kerli was ready in position for the song start.
The challanging part was that it was a one-off show and there was a lot of programming, no bugs allowed. 🙂 The area of the show was acoustically difficult, but luckily we had setup in one day, rehearsal in the second day and live on the third. So I could record the one rehearsal and then just virtually soundcheck the hell out of it.
All in all, we had a perfect team. Argo´s organizing skills are superb, everything happened like clockwork. Awesome time!