Chauvet lights 4 World Trade Centre studios
- Details
Having enough output during the day to stand out against the open-air background without bouncing light off windows is essential to making the studio’s system work; so too is having solid low ends when broadcasting at night. Mike Grabowski of the Lighting Design Group met these and other challenges at the state-of-the-art SNY 4 studio with help from over 300 Chauvet Professional Ovation fixtures.
“SNY’s Studio 42, numbered after baseball great Jackie Robinson, has a unique environment because it’s up so high,” said Grabowski. “Unlike other windowed studios in New York, which are located on the first or second floor, this one is 50 stories up, so you have a lot of open sky. Given the location of the studio, we needed fixtures that are great at the high end and able to produce a lot of clean bright light for daytime shows. Then at night, we wanted those same fixtures to have solid low ends at about 10 foot-candles, so we could light the set while still having all the twinkling lights of the city be visible in the background.”
The output and low-end capabilities of the Ovation fixtures were not the only features that made them invaluable in this installation. Grabowski also placed a premium on their colour rendering capabilities.
“There are two other studios in this complex besides Studio 42,” said Grabowski. “Both of them are numbered after Mets players: Studio 31 for Mike Piazza and Studio 41 for Tom Seaver. “Everything here is sports themed, so colour fidelity is essential. We need to reproduce sports team colours like Jets Green and Mets Orange. It can’t be kind of like those colours, it has to be those exact colours. So, we need a great deal of finesses in our lighting, which is exactly what the Ovations have delivered.”
(Jim Evans)
