Located in Franklin North Carolina; The Smoky Mountain Center for the Performing Arts is the brainchild of local businessman and arts patron Phil Drake who’s vision was to provide the rural town with a high quality performance venue to rival those found in major US cities. The 1500 seat auditorium opened its’ doors in 2009 and since then has hosted a high quality program of live music and theatrical productions as well as corporate events. Pisgah AVL carried out a comprehensive technical re-vamp including the installation of a Chauvet F2 video wall, Chauvet Pro Moving Head Fixtures, High End Systems Hog 418 lighting console, AI media server and a complete fly system including power distribution and load cells.
“Pisgah AVL are only an hour away from us in Asheville which has made the process much easier”.
Logan Wallace – Technical Direcor
The venue’s technical director Logan Wallace explained that the centers location five hours east of Nashville and three hours North of Atlanta made the decision to work with Pisgah AVL much easier, “They were only an hour away from us in Asheville which makes technical support much easier”. During the planning phases Pisgah’s Installation Director Ryan Hargis and project manager Robert Shaffer arranged a number of demonstrations to illustrate the systems capabilities and in turn listen to feedback and really get a feel for what the venue needed.
“The main reason for installing the wall is we host a number of productions each year where the full production falls on us, the wall allows us to expand our creative capability but also saves on the cost of renting and storing scenic backdrops”.
The centerpiece of the update is the new video wall; at just under 40ft wide and with a pixel pitch of 2.9mm the F2 video wall provides a stunningly crisp image from just a couple of feet away. The venues technical director Logan Wallace explained “The main reason for installing the wall is we host a number of productions each year where the full production falls on us, the wall allows us to expand our creative capability but also saves on the cost of renting and storing scenic backdrops”. Logan notes the benefits don’t just stop there; “we’ve also had a number of touring productions where we haven’t had to build a video wall or we’ve been able to quickly throw up a logo instead of flying a backdrop”. In recent years these kind of displays have been increasingly used in theatre, unlike a traditional projects and screen the wall can provide over 1500 nits of brightness illuminating the stage, this creates an incredibly immersive show experience. The venue’s choice to go with the Chauvet system was natural “For the money there’s not anything out there that looks as good as the F2” says Logan.
Given that venue frequently hosts corporate and business events it was a request that panels from the main wall could be removed to create two smaller ground-supported displays on each side of the the downstage. For these smaller walls Pisgah specified 1×1 aspect ratio panels to make handling easier and to allow easy relocation of the displays if necessary. The total pixel count of the new wall was fractionally under a UHD resolution so video drivelines were replaced with 12g SDI to ensure that a full 4K resolution video signal could be carried to the processor without any signal degredation.
Ensuring a safe and easy to use system was very important, Pisgah AVL specified an integrated power distribution system and motor control system from Applied Electronics. Four 1 ton CM lodestar motors allow the wall to be safely lifted out of the way when not in use; for added safety these are networked with lode-cells which measure the lifting force on each motor and provide and emergency cut-out if the load on a single motor exceeds it’s safe threshold. The power supply for the wall is provided by multicore Socapex cable; rather than running multiple power cables to each section of wall, cabling is kept nice and clean with two cable runs to the wall which breakneck out to individual wall panels. When taking the initial venue measurements it became apparent that trim hight was going to be very tight, this was overcome by specifying Applied Electronic’s Media truss; this incorporates an additional centre tube to clamp the LED wall’s rigging hardware too and in-turn helping to gain a crucial 2ft of height over traditional box section trussing.
“…we’d already been using the Chauvet Slim Pars and with how far Chauvet has come in their professional line we naturally chose more Chauvet Fixtures, we’re super happy with them”
With the upgrade to the video system is was only natural the lighting would have to follow suit too. “It became apparent that we had to upgrade the lighting with new features to match the brightness of the wall, we’d already been using the Chauvet Slim Pars and with how far Chauvet has come in their professional line we naturally chose more Chauvet Fixtures, we’re super happy with them” Logan reported. A total of 12 Maverick Force II profiles and 24 Maverick washes were added to the rig. With the lower power consumption and increased output of new generation LED lighting the existing lighting grid was more than sufficient to provide enough juice of for the new fixtures. As well as being brighter the new additions added a new degree of convenience as the in house crew no longer needed to use a basket lift to re-focus the downstage lighting resulting.
No re-vamp would be complete without giving the audio system some love too. The PA system was originally rigged with fixed hardware so three additional CM Lodestar Motors were added so that the sound system clusters could be lowered and dropped safely.
These new additions were almost immediately put into action with the Overlook Theatre companies productions of Disney’s Descendent’s and The Magical Lamp of Aladdin. Pisgah AVL are incredibly proud to support local venues and the great work of SMCPA.