Behind the Scenes

Welcome to a quick behind the scenes look at setting up a Neko Nation show. While Neko Nation starts at 8pm, for the setup crew, work starts as early as 9-10am and sometime doesn't end till 9am the next day! There is a lot of integral planning that goes into a show and setup is the last major hurdle that we encounter, we literally take an empty room and turn it into a mega party night thanks to the help of our awesome team, here's a bit of a look at some of the pics of the process.
This is what we would rock up too, a pretty straight forward empty room, dancefloor, DJ area, you could probably make a simple 18th birthday with sparse lighting, sound and basic DJ gear. Far from Neko Nation's standards, we've got a lot of work to do to transform all this around before the show start later on in the night!
First thing is first, we get all the gear to our venue, we push baggage limits on flights and we fill up a car or two or sometimes a van up to the brim with all our technical gear to get this show in motion. We dump everything on the floor, start sorting out where things need to go and make a start on the setup.

The preparation of the staging area. While some areas don't need much work such as the dancefloor and bar which more or less are good to go, the creation of a staging area is one of our first priorities for the event. In this case, we've got a temporary stage that we've rented up and created for the Perth show.

This was taken partway through the setup for our Brisbane show in May 2013. This was one of the most interesting and ambitious new setups we tried for a show, featuring LED Sakura trees, industrial fans and an awesome new staging setup which would go with our live performance LeLe. As you can see, the setup is coming together but it doesn't have that special look with all the lights on.
When the lights go out! The venue starts to look really unique and special as we do a test run of all the lighting, sound, tech gets all put to the test before all the guests come within an hour or two.
It's showtime!