An insight into the world of staging and rigging specialists

With ES Trucking sold to Transam, the assets of its Staging and Projects divisions were acquired in March by new company, ES Global, a joint venture between Dubai-based Al Laith and Serious Stages in the UK, securing the delivery of major projects going forward.

“While the business has clearly been through a very challenging period, we can look forward with some confidence, underpinned by a healthy order book and a strong, experienced team in place,” Al Laith founder, and chairman of ES Global, Tony Nobbs, said. “Staging division ESS continues as a standalone company, and we want to expand the product offering.”

“All of us at Serious are looking forward to working alongside ESS, bringing the strengths of both companies and a large range of staging solutions to the market,” managing director Steven Corfield Moore says.

Serious and London-based Atlantic Enterprises formally partnered with Al Laith on the launch of its Event Services division last March, having collaborated on several projects in the Middle East.

“There’s been a gradual process of establishing a local infrastructure,” Corfield Moore says. “We worked on the Doha Tribeca Film Festival for the first time last October, and there’s a good body of work out there. Despite world affairs, we’re still working in Saudi, and Qatar and Abu Dhabi are very stable and continue to offer a huge variety of contracts. But having a local partner is essential; that’s the model we’ve used in Australia and Spain for years.”

In the UK, on the back of its regular festival jobs last summer, Serious put a 40m Space Roof stage in at Hyde Park for BBC Proms in the Park, which stayed in situ for Radio 2’s Elvis Forever tribute and the Papal visit a week later.

Star Events Group will be back in Hyde Park this summer with Live Nation, providing the platform for two Kings of Leon dates, before Hard Rock Calling and Wireless. It is also supplying three Kings of Leon stadium shows, Coventry, Sunderland and Edinburgh, on the back of major projects at Radio 1’s Big Weekend and Download. All of its 20m and 25m VerTech systems are now supplied with an allocation of high tensile steel trusses, increasing rigging capacity.

 “It gives festival production managers some contingency while they’re waiting for information to come through from their headliners,” director of stages Pete Holdich explains. “The truss is completely interchangeable, so they can decide where to use it at assembly.”

Meanwhile, Star’s 13m and 15m Morbit stages have come into their own, the inherent economy of a single truck, drive in/out package finding new fans. A regular feature now in Trafalgar Square, there have been some additional elements for recent projects, notably the digiBOARD header between the PA towers for Chinese New Year and a projection screen framing the proscenium for World Book Night (pictured left).

“If we don’t have a solution on file from the archive of stages and support structures we’ve built over the years, we can usually come up with something,” Holdich adds. “And it’s bespoke results from stock items.”

Paul Haigh, managing director at Daytona Stage Hire, has long espoused the cost benefits of mobiles. The company rents four sizes, from the 8m by 5m DS40 to the 100sq m DS100, and has picked up a lot of new business.

“Last year was our busiest ever, and 2011 is looking even better,” he says. “We’ve rebuilt the DS40, investing in a full trussing system and hydraulics, and putting in lots of extras for the same price. People who might not have considered mobiles before have seen that they’re a cost-effective option. They only take one or two hours to set up, and we’re happy to come in and do that early so the client is only looking at a day hire, with no extra labour or security costs.”

Take That’s Progress Live is sure to be a spectacular in May/June/ July. Details are under wraps until Sunderland, but it will be based on a Stageco platform.

“It’s going to be an amazing show,” project director at Stageco, Dirk de Decker, smiles. The company is familiar with the highest echelons of production achievement, its revolutionary ‘Claw’ stage is still touring the world with U2, and it helped engineer the ‘skyscraper’ for Muse’s Resistance shows last summer.

“A lot of the normal givens weren’t applicable on both of those,” de Decker says. “We needed to rethink a lot of things, but that’s what we do.” U2 play North America from the end of May to July, on the back of South America and South Africa, leg three of a world tour which started in June 2009. “The routine the guys have developed to take that show apart has gone beyond what we expected,” de Decker says. “They’re always pinching another minute here and there.”

“What we do is as much about engineering something that will travel and load in easily as what it’ll look like during the show,” John Gittins, operations manager at set fabrication specialist Brilliant Stages, reports. The company is responsible for the mechanics behind the giant marionettes currently out with Roger Waters, and has been hard at work on some clever stuff for Take That, having worked on their last two outings.

“The Circus had some really elaborate elements,” he says. “The set designers we work with are hugely accomplished, and advances in CAD mean we’re able to develop bigger, more adventurous ideas all the time. The likes of Mark Fisher, Kim Gavin and Es Devlin know what we’re capable of, and it’s an ongoing design process, even as we’re building.

“Whenever you’ve got a B stage, you’ve got to think about how you’re going to get there, and that’s getting more and more creative.” Take That’s elephant sticks in the memory, but for Gittins the 150ft bridge into the arena for the Rolling Stones’ Bridges to Babylon tour takes some beating. “It’s still one of the best gags ever done!”

Hands On Decks

LS-Live’s set construction operation complements its staging and equipment rental divisions. Parting ways with truss manufacturing arm, Litestructures, last year, the company has joined forces with Acorn Event Solutions, bolstering its stocks of stage decking and capacity for outdoor site structures, from ramps, steps and gantries to delay towers. It has also developed a modular roof system based on a space frame structure that can be suspended from standard Prolyte CT towers to create a roof up to 37m.

Impact Production Services carries one of the largest stocks of LiteDeck in the UK, and added a significant amount of Layher kit, compatible with its Prolyte roof systems, to the inventory in 2009. The investment paid off with a marked increase in business last year, a result of extended capabilities as well as capacity.

“Both the LiteDeck and Layher products are in demand,” project manager Tom Warden explains, “but the Layher scaffold system’s integral bracing means we can take on jobs that we couldn’t before. We did an event at Sandown that was on a steep slope, and we’re getting lots of enquiries for ramps and viewing platforms.”

Steeldeck Rentals has doubled its inventory over the last four years, and will be adding hundreds more decks this season. It expanded its warehousing capacity at the end of 2010 and has taken on new staff to support a growing client base.

“We’re waiting to see what local government cuts will mean for our customers, but we’re significantly up on turnover growth compared to the first quarter last year,” director Richard Howey Nunn says.

“We’ve already had notification from one local authority that they’re not going to run any events this year, including their main summer festival, because of cut-backs,” Colin Wright, managing director at Alistage states. And there’s a real possibility others will find themselves in a similar situation as council budgets get fi nalised around the country. However, Alistage has started to receive enquiries relating to extra-curricular activities in 2012 as the country gears up for its time in the Olympic spotlight, and continues to work regularly at the BBC, providing staging for its record-breaking Comic Relief telethon in March, and the current series of Later… with Jools Holland. Some offbeat projects so far this year have included the dry hire of a small clear-covered Alidome stage to Zero Degrees Events for the Big Snow Festival in Andorra, and a complex substructure for a bedouin tent constructed at Hampton Court for the filming of Warner Brothers’ Jack The Giant Killer, scheduled for release next year.

Concept Staging has built up an extensive project portfolio across the television, music and corporate sectors, fabricating solutions in-house when they’re not on the shelf. The company had two sets of kit out with the WWE WrestleMania Revenge Tour, for its RAW and Smackdown shows respectively, putting in an additional stage set for the O2 Arena dates, which were filmed for broadcast.

“They come over twice a year and we supply them with a bespoke ring surround, ramp and stage, identical to the ones they use in the States,” managing director Gary Hilton says.

And Concept has been contracted for a range of site structures at stadiums this summer. “Anything from signage towers to viewing platforms to exit staircases,” Hilton adds.

Innovation

Movetech UK and The Revolving Stage Company are both committed to developing and updating quality products, and primed to respond quickly to what can often be last minute requests.

“We’ve had two calls in the last half hour for supply tomorrow,” Tim Entwistle, managing director at Movetech says, by way of example. “But that’s the event business, and we’re set up to deal with it.”

Part of the British Turntable Group, Movetech works in a range of industries, but has expanded its rental range with exhibitions, events, film and TV in mind, adding larger units up to 30m in diameter and providing more motion control options.

“We’re always updating our software, making it more powerful and capable of integrating with other technologies,” Paul Hulston, director of The Revolving Stage Company confirms. “We supplied a 4.5m diameter revolve to the Vrienden Van Amstel Live festival at the Ahoy Arena in Rotterdam in January which supported more than seven tonnes of circular truss, rigged with LED on one side and lifting platforms and lighting on the other. It was used throughout, operated by our Revolvesolve Encoder package, without a problem.”

Meanwhile, the company has added a 1.5m display unit to its hire stock, capable of raising and lowering weights up to 750kg to a height of 1.3m, and come up with a way to install its stages around a central column, should indoor space not be clearspan.

“[Our job is] to make sure that when the enquiries come in, virtually everything is an off the shelf solution, and that the price is keen enough for the event budget,” Hulston continues.

“And over the past two years of so-called recession we’ve installed more stages than ever.”

Paul Hulston, Director of The Revolving Stage Company

Drapes and rigging specialist Blackout recently added medium duty LitePro truss from Litestructures to its rental stock, complementing its existing inventory to support day to day calls for small, medium and heavy duty truss, even when a lot is out of the warehouse on big projects.

The company put in a ground supported grid infrastructure for the rotating ‘Magic Box’ set at the MTV Europe Music Awards at the Caja Mágica in Madrid last November, then a lightweight grid over the stage for the channel’s Africa Music Awards at the Eko Expo Hall, Lagos in December. It was back at the BRITs too, in a bigger way at The O2, putting large amounts of ceiling and drape into the party structure, and coming up with the cracked fibre optic backdrop for Rihanna’s performance.

On the corporate side, there have been jobs for Sprout and Deeper Blue, on behalf of Nissan and Vauxhall respectively, and a project in Amsterdam for Cake, creating a blacked out theatre in a glass-roofed warehouse for the European media launch of the Nintendo 3DS.

“We work across a lot of areas, from pop shows to the party world to corporate stuff,” project director Kevin Monks says. “We’ve been doing some TV work too, entertainment shows are very video heavy. We rigged the set and screens for James Corden’s A League Of Their Own and we’ve done a couple more pilots for Sky on the back of that.”

Perhaps the biggest project in recent months though, was the 77 Mta Celebration Event devised by WRG Qatar on behalf of Qatar Petroleum, Qatargas and RasGas to mark the achievement of the Emir’s target for production capacity of 77 million tonnes of liquefied natural gas per annum.

“It came straight after the opening ceremony of the [emirate’s] first shipyard, another event we did for WRG Qatar,” Monks says. “We had guys out there from the beginning of November to the end of December. They were both big shows, but the 77 Mta event was a one-off of Vegas proportions.”