Jungala: bringing a vision to life

Tim Hart, Client Service Director 

For the second year running, the Magnetic Storm Cape Town team has had the pleasure of working on the spectacular Jungala event.  Jungala is an annual trance festival that happens in a forest in Gouda, Western Cape. 

With a very clear vision of what they want to achieve, the organisers briefed our team about its theme, décor requirements and the concept for the stage where the DJs will entertain their audience day and night. 

The stage featured video mapping to bring the vision for a full jungle sensory experience to life. Teamed with lighting to create the right mood for festival go-ers, and an audio experience to match – it was a memorable experience for all. 

Personally overseeing the full technical elements for the event, including renderings for the stage structure.  I worked closely with the organiser to bring his vision to life.  Once the renderings were complete, the organizer sent across the decor design overlay. From here we could create the lighting plan and identify what each element was bringing to the experience and how the elements would connect to bring his concept to life. 

Being an open-air music event, the organisers also had to be considerate of their neighboring farmers.  Although we needed a uniform bass across the dancefloor, we had to control the throw distance and overall SPL to ensure we did not upset the local community. 

In the days running up to the event, we had to prepare all full technical equipment for the predicted rain, plus setup to do a photo scan of the stage for the mapping element of the event.    

With bated breath, we waited for the rain to come, luckily it stayed away until after the scan of stage. Back in Cape Town I built a 3D model of the stage in Cinema 4D. The day before the festival we then did a SMART sound check to align the PA system, where we had  decided on a cardiod bass array to get the most even sub bass pattern on the dancefloor and less behind stage. We programmed the lights and setup projection mapping utilizing 3D-Mapping software as well as Resolume for VJ Content. Working throughout the night we lined everything up and finalised the five different masks we would be using. 

Come festival time, everything happened as planned. We even designed more video content during show to be ready of the following night which the VJ (Video Jockey) combined with planned footage. With the festival running non-stop for three days, it was important to give the crew enough time to sleep and rotate to keep everyone well rested and on top form for their shift. It was a magnificent event with huge positive feedback from the client, particularly congratulating us on our attention to detail. Roll on Jungala 2017!