Staging and rigging company sets new stage during pandemic

Imagine the rapt audience at the NFL Draft as new draft picks are announced and welcomed on stage. Or fans flocking the stages at the world’s largest hip-hop festival, Rolling Loud, for a glimpse at their favorite hip-hop star. With custom structures and rigging, these are the type of experiences Mountain Productions has delivered for more than 18,000 entertainment, corporate, and government events over the past 40 years.

But now that has all changed. When the true impact of COVID-19 became apparent and large-scale events were canceled, Mountain Productions decided to pivot completely and take on the battle to combat the pandemic. Now, the goal of the newly created MTN Emergency Services division is to save lives with the redesigns of modular medical structures and production of PPE. And their pivot happened within a matter of days in March.

“Once the pandemic began to grip the world, we knew it was time to act,” says Ricky Rose, CEO, Mountain Productions. “We’ve done extensive research and interviews with large healthcare institutions, doctors, and government officials to ensure we address the needs of all who would utilize our more than 25 unique modular emergency facilities. It took approximately 48 hours to redeploy our teams and modify our structures in AutoCAD to meet the needs of the medical field.”

Using their existing equipment and existing designs in AutoCAD, MTN Emergency Services group is producing large-scale mobile hospitals, mobile testing centers, temporary living quarters, and emergency response structures that accommodate up to 30,000 square feet.

The design team found it easy to make the changes in AutoCAD and add the medical-grade components required to transform their structures. According to the team, the ability to create 2D drawings freely and with expedience is an immense advantage. And the great flexibility in cross-collaboration due to the ability to import and export files of different types makes the workflow easier.

“Most of the designs were retrofits of existing structures so very little was needed to change these robust structures into a deployable system,” says Matthew Griffith, Director of Operations, EIT-Mountain Productions  “Entertainment structures need to be able to hold enormous amounts of weight to support lighting, audio, and video production, but also have a clear span and a lot of head height. The medical industry didn’t need 70' tall structures, so we adjusted the designs in AutoCAD to be optimized for faster build times and have head heights in the 15-20' range instead.”

Mountain Productions also relies on Dropbox and its integration with AutoCAD for file-sharing between all four offices. When creating MTN Emergency Services, the teams were working between Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania; Dublin, Ireland; and Sicily, Italy. AutoCAD 3D models were sent from the U.S. office to Sicily to be built out into full hi-res renderings for both video and stills.

“One of our Dublin-based design members was quarantined in Italy, which resulted in the entire team collaborating between the time zones,” says Rose. “Due to the time zones, we were essentially able to work around the clock between design edits and updates, and then publish onto our new website. You would not believe the efficiencies that were created during this period. Our total work output greatly expanded during this project.”