All Hearts for grandMA3

Lighting for the recent legs – including the USA and Canada – of popular and prolific Indian singer Shreya Ghoshal’s “All Hearts” world tour was programmed by Manu Jacob using an all grandMA3 control system solution for this section of the tour, and the first time on a touring project.

Brought onboard as programmer by Mumbai based show producers BToS Productions, he worked closely with the lighting design team from LAGFL Designs on ensuring that the show they had crafted was programmed in the most efficient, logical, and flexible way, enabling the showfile to be swiftly updated to deal with different sized venues.

“It was to facilitate this and also for the networking capabilities that I decided to make the switch to all grandMA3 for this project,” he stated, adding that he has been working on the grandMA platform for the last 10 years, and appreciates its “huge power and adaptability”.

The 8-week North American leg of the tour kicked off with a warm-up show in Mauritius and involved approximately 160 lighting fixtures, mostly Robe moving lights according to the original spec. However, the type of luminaire varied according to the venue and lighting vendor … so there were plenty of fixture exchanges taking place over the course of the tour.

When it started in India earlier in the year, the artist was playing even larger venues, so the show was initially programmed using around 400 luminaires.

In the US, several different lighting vendors were involved, depending on the venue and promoter, with Event EQ who are part of LMG Touring & Entertainment, supplying the most shows on the itinerary, co-ordinated for them by BJ Singh.

The lighting plot was initially drawn up in Vectorworks and imported via MVR (My Virtual Rig) to Depence 3 and then into the grandMA3, a process that worked very smoothly and which Manu describes as “super cool”.

He really enjoyed using the grandMA3’s Phasers, describing them as “one of the best features” of the grandMA3 software, and in conjunction with this, Selection Grid, which “helped make elements of my job much easier”.

Once the Grid was ready, he was also quickly able to use and update all his MAtricks.

Shreya Ghoshal’s show has a wide dynamic range for lighting, with lots of bold, bouncy up-tempo numbers balanced with softer ballads and slower, softer moments, all delivered with great enthusiasm to her fans.

Some parts of the show are run to timecode, so for these sections, Manu used Recipes to assist the programming which he describes as “a seamless process”.

The show was run from a grandMA3 full-size console, and for the gigs, serviced by Event EQ, a grandMA3 light was provided for backup together with 3 x grandMA3 processing units.

In the USA, the production manager was Klaus Baker and the lighting crew chief was Priscilla Mullins.

Manu, based in the beautiful coastal city of Kochi in Kerala, India, and working internationally, has also recently become an official MA trainer, working in conjunction with Hi-Tech Audio & Image, the authorized distributor for MA Lighting in India, and as part of this frequently runs workshops and sessions hosted across the country. “There’s a big interest in grandMA3 in India right now,” he observed.

He thinks the MA brand generally has a great reputation for offering fast, efficient, and practical programming to enable some very creative work.

Photos: © Sahil Makhani from SMFilms

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