Cape Town-based stage and production design company Formative Design is pushing tech boundaries in the SA live event design industry.
The company works to breathe cutting-edge tech solutions into video, sound, and lighting orchestration to meet the changing demands of live event design. "It's no longer about some cool flashing lights with a band on stage," comments Gareth Hadden, business director at Formative.
According to Hadden, Formative is the only company on the continent using d3 media servers. The specialised servers allow users to work with props and moving stage elements in addition to projection, lighting and LED screens, essentially integrating the numerous elements of live event design into one centralised IT system.
In addition to enabling precise synchronisation, this technology allows Formative to fully automate its shows, partly or fully depending on the individual event. "We're done a show before where at the beginning of the show you hit the space bar, and at the end of the show you hit it again," says Hadden.
The d3 servers double as integrated video production suites, allowing Formative to create custom video content for events and map projection of this content onto 3D objects. This offering is particularly useful because the traditional process of hiring one agency to create media content for an event and another to physically present it makes tweaking the content difficult should it need adjustments, says Hadden.
Formative is doing production for the Ubuntu Awards at the Cape Town International Convention Centre on Saturday 13 February.
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