All in Good Faith

Access All Area's Lisa Gudge reports on SFLs role at the Soul Survivor Festivals

Article from Access All Areas Magazine

The Royal Bath & West Showground in Shepton Mallet hosts tens of thousands of Christian worshippers for a series of spiritual conferences staged over the summer by the New Wine and Soul Survivor organisations respectively. Lisa Gudge looks at the logistics.

Growing out of New Wine, and following it on the same site since 1993, Soul Survivor attracts similar numbers per week to its youth oriented programme of seminars and workshops. Traditionally, New Wine comes to a close at midnight on Saturday, with a staged handover of the various venues to the incoming Soul Survivor production team beginning the next day. A transformation of much of the site takes place in the space of 30 hours. "It would be quite easy to say, 'This has worked for the last two weeks, why change anything?' and not be creative but these are two completely separate events and we want to give the site new energy," production manager Tom Jeffery tells Access. "Plus, some of the kids might go to both events, New Wine with their families, and ours for themselves, so we have to give the event its own identity."

Jeffery has worked on the project for several years, and in his current capacity, with live production company SFL, since 2002. All the Wigwam kit, he explains, comes out of marquees, with the exception of the Martin line array in the big top, which is reconfigured to allow for the removal of New Wine's grandstand seating in order to up the capacity in the structure to a maximum 10,500.

"Every venue changes," he continues. "What might have been a kids' art and craft space at New Wine needs to become a gig venue with a stage, full PA system and 40 channel desk front of house. We pull in crew from Nippy Industries and redo all the drapes. We get as much sound baffling in as possible because basically we're dealing with cowsheds," he laughs. Video installation is through 6th Sense Solutions, acquired by SFL in December 2003.

Seminar content aims to help young people apply the gospel and biblical teachings to their everyday lives, while workshops include sculpture, DJ-ing, dance and performing arts. In addition, numerous themed venues include Pulse dance hall, Chasers American Diner, Café Uno for jazz, the Eyesore art gallery, Dreggs, a 'high energy hang out' and Re.pose, a 'chilled zone', as well as a Cyber Café for internet and email access.

The showground's Showerings Pavillion, used as a market place by New Wine, became the 'Lift and Sports' venue for which SFL installed a line array system, video screens with live camera feed, and plenty of par cans, ensuring the arena stayed busy long into the evening. Another of the permanent buildings was converted into 'Celluloid', a 1,500 capacity cinema. "To get 5.1 surround sound back through the length of the building we had to divide it into three zones and repeat the five separate speaker clusters three times, delaying the second and third zones back to the screen," Jeffery explains. "It all ran off a Roland VM7200 digital desk."

Audio visual elements aside, much of the basic infrastructure is inherited. Jeffery and Soul Survivor's operations manager Nathan Lambert, work closely with the New Wine production team in the planning stages to negotiate long term contracts with suppliers. "It makes sense to agree four week hire terms for things like the toilet and shower blocks on the campsite and our on-site staff and catering accommodation," he says.

The close knit in-house production teams behind the events are prepared for every eventuality. "We have people who can operate fork lifts and cherry pickers, a plumber, a rigger, all on hand if something goes in the middle of the night," Jeffery agrees. Both events keep participation levels up, and budgets down, by using sufficiently qualified volunteers in numerous roles, including stewards, caterers, site crew and first aiders. "We mentor a lot of young people who volunteer as sound engineers," Jeffery adds. "They might mix sound every week at church, but this gives them a great opportunity to learn in a gig environment.