RAISING THE ROOF AT OSHEAGA
Locally made stages simpler, safer
Most of the music fans at this weekend’s Osheaga will have their attention firmly fixed on the festival’s stages, but it’s probably a safe bet that they won’t be spending much time thinking about the platforms themselves.
Yvon Miron, though, has been thinking about them for more than 30 years.
He’s the founder and CEO of Stageline, a L’Assomption-based company that makes the stages used at events like Osheaga and the Jazz Festival. It’s just one of a number of local companies working behind the scenes at Montreal’s festivals. While Stageline provides the stages, another local firm, Solotech, handles lighting and sound at many of the same events.
For Stageline, Montreal’s festivals have been a springboard to international growth. It has sold stages in more than 45 countries, Miron said.
“We do about 85 per cent of our business outside Quebec and we cover a lot of business in Quebec,” he said. “We have 190 employees — we’re a busy company.”
Stageline stages are used at around 20,000 events around the world every year, Miron said. That’s an average of more than 50 events per day.
Miron’s company doesn’t just make and sell them — it’s also the inventor of the specific kind of mobile stage.
On the road, it looks identical to a semi-trailer, and can be moved the same way.
But when it arrives at a festival site, a built-in hydraulic system essentially unfolds the trailer, turning it into the stage with a roof. The hydraulic system is also used to raise the stage’s roof.
Miron compares them to “big Transformer toys.”
Because the stages are largely self-contained and, when folded up, move like a regular cargo truck, they’re more mobile than other temporary stages, which have to be constructed on-site, Miron said.
Setting up a stage can take anywhere from an hour, for a small stage, to two days.
But that speed also depends on the circumstance. In June, the company set up one of its largest stages for a hip-hop festival at New Jersey’s MetLife stadium. It’s a busy venue, home to numerous events as well as two NFL teams, the New York Jets and the New York Giants.
That gave the company a small window to get the stage up and take it down. In the end, setup took 12 hours — a record for a Stageline platform of that size — while teardown took 19.
They are also safer than traditional temporary stages, Miron said.
The steel structure that supports the stage’s roof is constructed according to building code standards, Miron said, which goes beyond what’s required of outdoor stages.
“I like to think that we’ve really managed to force people to raise their safety standards,” he said.
Miron said he realized there was a need for a simpler — and safer — style of mobile stage when he was running an outdoor event production business in the early ’80s.
“Stages were built from the ground up, mainly with scaffolding, with crews who weren’t really familiar with building and installing a stage and, of course, in the summer in Quebec, all events happen at the same time,” he said. “There were always problems and delays. It was very costly.”
Unable to find a solution, Miron decided to develop his own and began consulting with experts in fields like engineering.
The development process was successful and in 1990, he decided to focus on Stageline full time.
Stageline isn’t the only local business making things happen behind the scenes at Osheaga.
STRIVING FOR IMPECCABLE SOUND
Montreal-based Solotech will be producing the audio-visual components of the festival.
“The big festivals in Quebec, we do them all, the jazz, Montréal en Lumière, Francofolies, Igloofest, Osheaga,” said Richard Lafortune, a vice-president at Solotech and the head of the company’s rentals team in Montreal.
It’s a complicated job that involves a lot of co-ordination.
Each of those festivals has their own production managers who work with the festival’s artists to identify what they need, Lafortune said.
Those production managers then bring those requests to Solotech, which puts them into practice.
It’s a complicated job because of the number of artists.
“A festival, you have to understand, is not like a tour. Many artists have to cross the same stage,” Lafortune said.
The key to keeping the artist happy, though, is sound.
“Because all the artists are musicians,” he said, “it’s important that the sound is impeccable.”
The sound also plays an important role for the audience.
“If we turn off the lights, we can still have a show. If we turn off the sound, we don’t hear anything,” Lafortune said.
For events like Osheaga, the company has designed a sound system that takes into account the environment where the event takes place, Lafortune said.
Sound will move differently in an environment of grass and dirt, for example, than it will in an urban setting, being absorbed or bouncing off different materials.
Setting up a sound system at a festival, he said, is a specialized job handled by a different technician than the one who mixes the sound during the concert.
Solotech doesn’t just do audiovisual production for festivals. The company, which has eight offices in the U.S. and Canada, also produces large tours. It’s worked with Bruce Springsteen, Lady Gaga, Justin Timberlake, Céline Dion and Cirque du Soleil.
“The Americans see us as a serious player now,” Lafortune said.
The company, which employs 800 people, also handles other audio-visual-related jobs. In March, it won a contract to install a video conferencing system for Montreal’s municipal court.
For Miron at Stageline, his business has grown, but it’s the festivals that got him where he is.
“It started here in Quebec with local festivals,” Miron said.