The studio, located on the 16th floor of The Shard in London features 80 of these Robe moving lights.
mo2 design was commissioned by set design and constructor Studio Hamburg, Germany's leading production service centre for film and television, which installed the studio's set and infrastructure on the strength of their designs for other high profile TV studio installations. These have included Phönixhof in Hamburg (also using Robe lights) and Sky Sports News in Munich.
The 600sq.m London studio is divided into two elements - the News Studio and the News Room. The hub of the main studio is a four-person desk in front of a video wall with a city view background, and a 3- person talk desk with a News Room background and a city view. The News Room features workstations buzzing with activity and the general hubbub of global news gathering. This is a format common to Al Jazeera facilities worldwide, and mo2 design had the chance to work on both spaces simultaneously, ensuring complete visual continuity.
Ollie and mo2 design project director Matthias Allhoffs' brief was to install a scheme offering the highest quality broadcast lighting in terms of uniformity, colour spectrum and perfect lighting angles to eliminate any shadowing on faces, etc.
The flexibility of mo2's solution means that lighting states can be changed and tweaked extremely quickly - imperative when broadcasting live on a daily basis.The mo2 design needed lighting that was appropriate for the technical tasks in hand as well as being truly harmonious with the visual environment. Being visible in all the studio shots, it was essential that the fixtures looked cool ... as well as doing their job.
Theoretically they had the choice between three different lightsources - tungsten / halogen, daylight or LED, however they picked Robe's tunable SmartWhite LED option because their warm and cold white outputs - something they had experimented with extensively in previous years - were excellent.
A new version of the Robin LEDWash 800 PureWhite SW was produced, complete with a rotating beam-shaper, which in combination with the zoom gives additional control over the beam - and eliminates the need for barn-doors. The fixture is also made with the newest and brightest LEDs, has an increased efficiency ratio than the previous generation models, and is the same expedient size as the ROBIN LEDWash 600 even though it's an 800 fixture.
The lighting installation and integration was completed by Lichtforum Berlin GmbH who supplied the Robe fixtures to the project's general contractor, Studio Hamburg. mo2 was supported throughout the project by Robe's German distributors, LMP.
(Jim Evans)
