The lighting was designed by Tom Kinane and Svend Pedersen, who made the bold creative move of not including a single moving light or any smoke in the rig. They wanted to introduce a completely new style of illumination for the show, utilising a substantial quantity of digital light sources to match Patrick Doherty's heavily LED based set.
Recorded in Studio 1 of the London Weekend Television HQ, space also restricted which lighting instruments could go where, and budget was also a consideration.
Around the top level of the multi-layered set were 22 BB4s, rigged just above three G-LEC LED screens, defining the top line of the set. They were used to add punch and brightness for accenting stings, and for snaps-to-strong-colour scenes. They were mounted on monopoles attached to special i-Pix brackets. Another 22 BB4s were used for under-lighting large expanses of the set floor space and two sets of Perspex stairs either side of the studio.
The BB7s were ensconced in the roof and used for down-lighting the stairs and the central circle on the studio floor - with the swipe machine - and also to aid Pedersen in punctuating specific sections of the show for the card swipes. Six units were placed around the central circle and one above each staircase.
All the BBs were driven by custom video clips played back from three dual output Catalyst digital media servers run by Pedersen from his Hog 3 lighting console.
"The greatest thing about the BBs is the homogenized light source, which eliminates any pixilation, so the fixtures appear just like a standard smooth tungsten source rather than the point-sources of the LEDs being visible. That and the 16-bit colour mixing, which allowed us to create the many off beat colours required," says Kinane.
(Jim Evans)
