The equipment list for the show an astounding 2,000sq.m of scenic LED and a long list of lighting fixtures, including 72 PRG Bad Boy luminaries, first seen at PLASA 2008 in London last autumn. Since the fixture hit the shelves at the beginning of this year, it has been seen on major tours from Oasis to Britney Spears and on television from the Grammy Awards to The Celebrity Apprentice, but in the words of Eurovision production manager Ola Melzig: "We got 72 - eat our dust!"
Two Virtuoso consoles controlled all of the stage lighting plus the 15 Catalyst Media Servers handling all of the video content. The Bad Boy fixtures were dotted around the entire rig and positioned directly over the stage to do "just about everything," says Rich Gorrod, lighting gaffer, who was on-site in Moscow since 31 March. "They're absolutely spectacular," Gorrod continues, "They're bright as hell, giving the Syncrolites a run for their money, with lightning snap colour and gobo change. Plus the zoom is unbelievable, from pencil beam to super wide, and most of all they're incredibly reliable. They were running 18 hours a day for the last five weeks - which says a lot for such a new light. They just do everything that it says on the tin fantastically well. We brought two techs to Moscow just for the Bad Boys and they were bored to tears!"
Lighting designer Al Gurdon (MTV Europe Awards, Robbie Williams) was equally as pleased, adding: "The Bad Boys really were the right tool for a job of this scale, in a venue of this size. For the first time we have a profile lamp which delivers the intensity capable of delivering diverse looks from a subtle ballad to a burn-your-retinas rock song, all for a stadium size television show."
The Bad Boy is engineered as a hybrid luminaire combining the qualities of a traditional automated light with a large venue fixture. "It was one of the first pieces specified for this production," says Melzig, "I first saw it at PLASA last year, and I could immediately tell that it was designed with today's shows in mind, which often involve high-brightness LED screens and large rigs. I thought, 'Aha!'"
The Bad Boy definitely stood out on the Eurovision stage, with a powerful 48,000 lumens. Its high definition optics work perfectly for television - yet another reason they were specified. In addition to the optical clarity that comes from using high-quality lenses, the Bad Boy features also include smooth, fluid control of focus, zoom range of 8:1 (7° to 56°), and imaging thanks to high-speed servo motors and full-field 0 to 100% dimming. The Quantum Color system utilises individual colour filters providing variation in both saturation and hue, resulting in a much broader and vibrant range of saturated colours. Plus, the Bad Boy was designed with energy efficiency and carbon footprint standards in mind.
(Lee Baldock)
