Robe joins Battle for Stardom
- Details
Lighting designer Tom Sutherland of DX7 DESIGN produced a large scale immersive 360-degree lighting environment for this second season. It was a distinctive aesthetic shift from the look and feel of the first season, and this time around, he included Robe MegaPointes and Spiiders on the rig.
The show was recorded in Studio 14 of the CBS Studio Centre in LA and the lighting equipment was supplied by California based Felix Lighting.
The programme format does not feature stage auditions. The artists - also known as the challengers - are placed in a ‘holding room’ before coming into the studio to sing in front of a live audience and three judges (currently Sean Combs, DJ Khaled and Megan Trainor) who decide on the best to compete against The Four.
An elaborate set involving substantial LED structures was produced by Florian Wieder of Wieder Design, a master creator of digital scenery, sets and environments, which are exciting and dynamic for TV and talent competitions. The lighting rig was also large, and gave Tom plenty of imaginative scope and latitude to produce radical and different looks for the many different performances each week.
The 28 x MegaPointes were positioned above what they called ‘The Frown’ a curved truss which provided a proscenium style mask for the central video wall, also curved, and as such was the icon-piece of the lighting design. Everything on the rig fed visually into the centre circle of lighting just behind the Frown.
28 of a total of 56 x Spiiders were hung immediately below the MegaPointes on the bottom of the Frown, along its curvature, and these were used extensively for all their various effects including the washes, beams and the centre flower, “It has all the oomph of an HMI lamp,” explains Tom, who’d been looking at using Spiiders for some time on a TV show, and this seemed a “perfect” opportunity.
The remaining Spiiders were all dotted around the Circle, retaining a central piece of the action. “I love the colours and the punch of these plus all the additional things you can get out of them over and above a standard LED wash light.”
The series creative director was Justin Mabardi and the ITV America producers were David Friedman and Becca Walker.
(Jim Evans)
