SERIOUS STAGES teams with creative site elements to give their sites additional pizzazz, such as the huge video towers we manufactured specifically for Far and Beyond( FAB) to give Download’ s fans great views across the main stage bowl.
“ There are also more bespoke elements to accommodate VIP guests, which are becoming an important part of the festival economy,” says Thomas.“ They include raised side-of-stage platforms and additional stories on the front-of-house towers that can be transformed into VIP bars and viewing areas.”
Other longstanding clients include Festival Republic, with Serious having first worked with Melvin Benn on the Reading Festival in the early 1990s. While Serious has become synonymous with the production of many of the UK’ s longest established festivals, it has also taken on new projects this year, including providing a 25-metre TZ Roof main stage for the live music delivery at the Formula
Caption 1 British Grand Prix at Silverstone, along with BBC Radio 1 ' s Big Weekend and Radio 2 In The Park. Other new projects this summer included Live Nation’ s
Caption Colchester Castle Summer Series.
Last year saw Serious unveil its new Stellar concert and festival stage at a series of shows presented by Festival Republic at Crystal Palace Park. Stellar is a 20m wide roof, with a 14m trim height, which features 7.5m covered stage sidewings, to give technical teams working room, in addition to the rear-stage area for artists’ equipment change-over.
Other Festival Republic projects include Wireless, Reading, Latitude and Leeds Festival. At the latter this year, the largest of the Serious stages installed was a TZ 25m six-tower main stage with a 45m frontage. Goalposts supported a curved video screen, while VIP guests enjoyed elevated platforms built into the stage wings.
Following its debut last year at Leeds, the 40,000-capacity, award-winning, Chevron Stage returned for a second year. Alongside a structure, designed and supplied by Special Structures Lab, that supported a 5,500 square metre canopy of LED lights stretched
Abbey Thomas
above the audience, it was Serious’ 20m Stellar Stage that provided a platform for the artists.
Among the many other major festival projects for Serious Stages over the summer was Parklife at Manchester’ s Heaton Park, which involved new infrastructure and increased staging capacity to support expanded production requirements. Serious worked alongside Parklife’ s production partner Engine No 4 to expand The Valley stage area. It involved supplying a 25m, four-post, TZ Roof, flanked by 9.6m wide goal-posts, with a 50m frontage.
The Bigger Picture
Serious Stages’ film stages business has evolved dramatically over recent years to become a huge success and a strategically important part of the company.
Building on its decades of experience delivering demountable venues at some of the UK’ s biggest festivals, Serious has dramatically progressed these buildings, to become a major player in the international film and TV industry, providing large-scale film stages, with a starring role played by its Meganova structures.
Serious designs, fabricates and installs bespoke sound-attenuated stages for some of the world’ s biggest film and TV productions, including many of the Mission: Impossible films, at its vast Longcross South Studios. The facility includes more than 200,000ft ² of stage space, nine acres of backlots, and a range of workshops and offices. It is home to five Meganova Stages, a product developed during the pandemic that was first used by the Mission: Impossible team and has since been embraced by production teams from the likes of Amazon, Netflix, Disney and Lucas Films.
Serious has five semi-soundproof stages, known as Space buildings, that have been created using a product originally designed as a festival stage that has been adapted in width, height and length to suit film needs. Festivals to have used the Space stage include TRNSMT and Parklike. All new studio builds are handled by the same set of crew who work across the festival season.
“ Prior to Covid, we had really intense summers, working on around 120 festivals from May to September, and then the workload dropped off a cliff,” says Thomas.“ It is really hard to make that sustainable for crew members. The year-round business model is a far more sustainable for crew and the company as a whole.”
Sustainability sits across the core of both of these divisions and the passion to minimise carbon impact across operations has driven the launch of renewable energy specialist Serious Energy, specialising in complex on / off grid demountable energy systems and green hydrogen solutions.
Looking ahead, Thomas says,“ We’ re looking forward to working with our clients, partners and crew to make positive engineering and logistical contributions to deliver inspirational events and we’ re already collaborating with clients planning numerous fabulous projects for 2026 and beyond.”
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