White Light had a team of seven at the event, led by lighting designer Jason Larcombe and production electrician Steve Richardson. The White Light team was called upon by the event's producers to provide lighting for the entrance of the cars, in the press area and in the drivers' lounge, working through some quite challenging conditions imposed by both the weather and the building.
"In freezing conditions, we constructed two 5m square, 4.5m high box trusses in the North service road, squeezing the trusses between the concrete pillars and requiring a bit of too-ing and fro-ing to work around the event's branding," Richardson recalls. Power to the trusses was fed from the outside broadcast area over 180m away to run 4kW, 2.5kW and 1.2kW HMI Fresnels together with 575W MSR Source Four Pars.
Inside, the Press room was equipped with upright sections of truss loaded with Source Pars to bounce light from the ceiling; in the Drivers' lounge similar truss sections were used to give good keylight positions for interviews, a relaxed feel for resting drivers, and spotlights fitted with gobos for corporate branding.
"The challenge about working indoors at Wembley is that it is wired for outside-broadcast but not really for additional internal lighting," Richardson notes. "We therefore had to run cables along roofs and come up with creative solutions to provide access for cables; ultimately we solved all of the problems, with the pictures beamed out to the Stadium and around the world looking quite fantastic."
(Jim Evans)
