"The show is the centrepiece of a huge music festival that draws fans from all over the world," says lighting director/programmer Mark Butts. "When ABC started to broadcast it a few years ago it really upped the ante in terms of design and production. For us, the show is an interesting hybrid of on-the-fly, festival-style lighting and tightly-cued, precise television lighting. It's difficult trying to work in both worlds simultaneously, but it sure keeps things interesting."
Even though the show is a network special there's very little camera rehearsal, Butts reports. "We look at everything for about an hour the night before the first show. This means that the first time we see a song, we're taping. This year they only recorded the songs marked for potential broadcast so I went to our previz studio in the morning and programmed all of the songs for that evening's show. Even with that much work done beforehand, there were a lot of last-minute tweaks for camera. So we needed gear that was flexible, responded quickly and was reliable in this type of environment. That's why we spec grandMA products on our jobs."
Two separate control systems were configured plus the system in the previz studio. Butts used five full-size grandMA consoles, five NSPs, two full grandMA video servers, an RFU, and an offline server at the studio. Among the lighting fixtures controlled by the grandMAs were 66 x Martin MAC 600s, 42 x Martin MAC 2000 washes, 38x Vari*Lite VL3000 spots, 14 x Vari*Lite VL2500 spots, and eight Martin MAC 2000 Professionals.
(Jim Evans)
