04 March 2008
Article and photos courtesy Louise Stickland
The first Avolites Tiger console in South Africa was delivered by distributors DWR to Pretoria-based lighting rental company, Stage Effects.
They bought the Tiger because they were specifically looking for another smaller console at a good price, and Duncan Riley from DWR alerted him to the launch of the console at PLASA 2007.
The Tiger’s first gig in the country was “Gospel Times”, a show broadcast from the South African Broadcasting Association (SABC) Studios, Johannesburg. From there it went directly on to Tempos, a Johannesburg venue where Stage Effects runs moving generic lighting. “It’s smaller than the Pearl but just as powerful” enthuses Stage Effects’ Theo Papenfus, “On many of these shows where you are just adding moving lights to a studio generic rig, you don’t need a large console”.
The Tiger joined the two Pearls already owned by Stage Effects, which works across all industry sectors, but particularly specialising in lighting for live concerts and broadcast applications.
Currently one of Stage Effects’ Pearls is in long term use at the Sasani TV Studios in Balfour Park Johannesburg for the Nedbank Green Zone games show, where it’s controlling moving lights (operated by Theo Papenfus) from Stage Effects and the studio’s in-house generics.
The moving lights are 2 Martin Professional MAC 600s and 4 Robe ColorSpot 575s, and the house rig is ten 2K fresnels, four 1K fresnels and 4 Iris floods.
Theo Papenfus bought his first Pearl 4 years ago. Earlier in his career, he cut his programming and operating teeth on a Sapphire console, which gave him a taste for the instant access and easy programming philosophies of Avolites. When he founded Stage Effects in 2001, he continued the Avo route.
“It’s a very reliable brand, and we also provide lights for a lot of international acts” he explains, “For which Pearls are frequently specified”. The other Pearl is currently installed into Studio 3 at Sasani for “Jika Ma Jika”, where it’s controlling 12 Robe ColorSpot 575s.
Papenfus says that the support from DWR is always “Fantastic”. However the only thing he’s needed support on for the Pearls has been two ‘water incidents’, and in both cases, everything was sorted within a week by DWR.
