Elation lights cheerleading championship
- Details
Rental and production company Lite Tek Entertainment supplied and designed lighting for the event and turned to an Elation lighting package of Cuepix and DTW blinders, Protron strobes, SixPars and more to highlight team routines across five different stages.
The National Cheerleading Championship is one of the biggest of its kind in the world. A typical year would see 1,400 teams competing but due to a 50%, reduction in allowed participants due to the pandemic, some 700 teams competed at this year’s event. Nevertheless, the event was huge with stages spread across two buildings and 90 acres.
“This was, to the best of our knowledge, the largest event in the world since COVID with up to 50,000 people coming through the facility two days in a row,” states Lite Tek founder and owner, Darren Lewis. “Cheersport created an effective plan to manage the onsite people flow with guidance from Varsity Spirit and the CDC fulfilling a discrete observation role. There were no spikes or known outbreaks that were traced to the event so it worked out really well.”
Lite Tek Entertainment, based in Richmond, Virginia, has handled all of Cheersports’ regional cheerleading events for the past 15 years and has worked the National Cheerleading Championship event several times. This year, Lewis served as production manager and principal lighting designer for the event, coordinating video and audio as well, across five competition halls plus a virtual awards ceremony.
Lighting design was a collaborative effort across the Lite Tek team with all five stages featuring nearly identical lighting setups starting with a downstage truss lined with Elation Cuepix and DTW Blinders.
“We put eight of those up along the front edge and lit the entire 60 x 60ft stage and didn’t get any hotspots,” Lewis states of the LED blinders. “The truss was too close to the stage to do it with Par lights but the Cuepix and DTW fixtures were perfect because we got an instant spread of the beam with an even wash. The photographers and videographers loved it because the stage was lit perfectly even.”
Each cheer routine started with gobo movement onto a closed semi-transparent scrim curtain across the front of the stage with complementary color splashed onto the backdrop. When a team entered, the curtain opened and lights ballyhooed in an energetic barrage of colour and movement. Protron 3K strobes along the front truss and Protron 3K Color strobes along the back strobed and color washed before going to a warm white wash for each routine. As the cheerleaders entered, Platinum FLX moving heads on the front corners of the stage projected onto the backdrop then frosted out for side-fill or background lighting. Also housed in each rig were LED moving head washlights, discharge-based profile luminaires and LED moving linear strips. SixPar 200 Par lights were used to light the entrance and exit stairs for each stage.
The lighting sequence complemented each team’s cheerleading routine and was repeated every 3-4 minutes throughout each day. Prior to the start of the routines however and used to generate excitement as spectators arrived were colour and effects from Rayzor Q7 LED moving heads. A double arch of truss lined with ACL 360 Bars also provided flashy looks as parents and spectators arrived. Lite Tek also designed and filmed an awards video used on the event's social media pages in which ACL 360 Bars lined a video wall with Protron 3K strobes playing a role as well.
