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Commonwealth Games Flying Start with Stage One
The opening and closing ceremonies of the Melbourne 2006 Commonwealth Games were the latest global events to benefit from Stage One’s specialist engineering expertise.
Brought on board by Jack Morton Worldwide, producers and creators of the ceremonies, Stage One’s motion control system - Q-Motion - was the natural choice to manage all the flying sequences during the ceremonies. These included: the spectacular opening sequence where one of Melbourne’s best loved icons, a W-Class tram complete with wings, ‘flew’ down into the stadium; the dream sequence of the young boy, the beautiful aerial ballet, which involved Stage One ‘flying’ 12 dancers from the Australia Ballet and finally, ‘flown’ pyrotechnics. In order to achieve all these aerial movements Stage One used a total of 27 22kW hoists on two complete data networks.
Jim Tinsley, Stage One’s technical director, said: “We’ve spent a great deal of time developing Q-Motion to bring it to the point we’re at now. Given the difficulties of staging a huge outdoor event, we are obviously pleased that we can achieve the accurate movement of either a 1300kg tram or a single aerial performer in exactly the same precise way.” He added: “Q-Motion is something Stage One is rightly very proud of and we will continue to develop it in order to keep pushing the boundaries of aerial engineering.”
Particular requirements of these games included five simultaneous motion playbacks, a global deads patch and the ability to enable and disable axes within cues, so that if one aerialist was not hooked up in time the global cue could run. This task was undertaken by the back-up operators.
Stage One completed further development work on their 3D animation package, allowing the off-line programming of individual spot points, to provide three-dimensional flying paths.
The company also supplied and controlled the 21m diameter central lighting truss, which lifted to a height of 50m with nearly seven tonnes of lighting on it. The truss had to be able to be lowered to the ground in under 10 minutes, in case the infamous ‘four seasons in one day’ Melbourne weather did its worst. On the ground, Stage One constructed and controlled a seven metre diameter central hydraulic lift, capable of lifting 12 tonnes to a height of four metres in only 30 seconds and upon which the band played in the Opening Ceremony whilst the athletes were introduced and which carried out further tricks in the Closing Ceremony. The movements were all controlled by Stage One’s Next-Q software and Q-Pos, showing the Company’s unique flexibility.
Stage One also supplied and controlled the ram system for the tilting hydraulic lift, as a sub-contract to Edwin Shirley Staging, which was capable of lifting and lowering a payload of over 30 tonnes in 40 seconds and travelling a distance of up to three metres.
Finally, all the shows programming was undertaken by Australian technicians, so Stage One undertook the huge challenge of teaching them all the intricacies, bells and whistles of Next-Q and Q-Pos - in only three months. This was achieved by building an off-site rehearsal rig to play with!
13th April 2006
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