Skogbrannfestivalen

Half a year ago Tanya and Hans Jakob Winsnes at Alive Dance Ministries in Norway, shared their vision of a brand new festival with a small group of people. Half a year later the Skogbrann Festival was a reality. After much effort from the many volunteers and swift planning as the project came along, the festival could receive its first ever delegates on August 27 and 28.

My role in the team was as a technical consultant and sound-designer. A challenge we came across from the outset was to plan the stage, rig and sound-system to the right size. It needed to fit with both the number of delegates and the acts going on stage. With a versatile Meyer sound-system and a stage that could easily fit our most spacious acts we could cater to a large span in delegate numbers.

The festival aimed to gather U.S. and Norwegian artists together for praise and worship from across different Church communities. Amongst the artists were:
Amber Brooks (Morningstar Ministries, U.S.)
CJ Hardee (Morningstar Ministries, U.S.)
David Vallier (Morningstar Ministries, U.S.)
Liz Fox Stillwell (Life Church, U.S.)
Impulsbandet, Norway
Marion Winsnes, Norway
And several others…

For the tech-heads:

All performances were taped right to ProTools from three Dante MY16-AUD extension cards at the back of the front-of-house mix (a Yamaha M7CL with stageboxes). The cards were connected to a router, and further to a MacBook Pro by Cat 5 cable. The data was sent from the Mac to an external hard-drive with a RAID 0 setup to swiftly push away as much data as possible. Connection to the hard-drive was done on FireWire 800. The Dante cards lock you to 48 kHz and 24 bits and are hence predominantly aimed at the film and broadcast marked. After some installation headaches with the Dante-software the recording-rig eventually ran smoothly. The OS Snow Leopard had to be run as a 32-bit system in the end but this also worked fine. The Dante cards were great but installation and licensing could have been made a lot easier. Many thanks to Norsk Produksjon who put in a lot of effort to make sure our recording-rig got up and running. A lot of great music was played over the weekend and it’s gonna be exciting to get the final mixes done.

A rainy weekend in a muddy field gave many a musician associations to Woodstock. Even more reason to come back next year!


Early in the morning: Big stage alone in the woods of Norway


Amber Brooks, CJ Hardee & David Vallier in action


View from my office


The work desk