Creative Technology supplied Elation broadcast lights to Lighting Design Group for use on sportscast booths and stages in and outside of Sofi Stadium during Super Bowl LVI in Los Angeles.
Dennis Size, Executive Vice President of Design for Lighting Design Group (www.ldg.com), was responsible for the overall lighting design and turned to Elation Fuze Profile CW™ and KL Panel™ luminaires for key, fill and wash lighting.
Conventional to moving heads
Multiple stages scattered around LA provided pre- and post-game coverage while promoting the city and shows for client Comcast. This was the fourth Super Bowl in which LDG has been involved and was Size’s second time working a Super Bowl. Having used conventional fixtures at the Super Bowl in Minneapolis four years ago, he says their inflexibility led him to request more moving lights for this year’s plot.
That’s what drove the design concept of a moving light rig. At the Minneapolis Super Bowl, we were forced to do a lot of last minute re-focusing — inefficiently wasting time and requiring additional crew. In L.A. I wanted to be able to make changes rapidly and avoid the studio L.D.’s having to always grab a ladder to make repairs and re-focus.
Fuze Profile CW
Size turned to technology services provider Creative Technology (www.ctus.com), part of the NEP Group, for a solution. CT’s Christopher Hibbard had introduced the Fuze Profile CW to Size a couple of years before on a presidential event. “It is a very practical fixture and the price point is excellent”, says Hibbard of the LED framing fixture that CT’s Chris Wasilauskas and Ian Dobson had worked closely with Elation to develop. “But it also has value from a design standpoint. I have designed with them on trade shows and corporate shows and it fulfills 95% of what you need to do”. He underlines that they are ideal for broadcast projects where budgets are often very tight. “If a client is looking for an LED Leko, I tell them that for just a bit more they can have a moving head with all the flexibility that gives”.
Size adds that on jobs like the presidential event you often end up with a lot of moving lights, which makes for an expensive rig.
As a designer, I want to get the best possible design I can but also be as financially efficient as I can for our clients. Chris suggested I try the Fuze and it was quite successful. When you’ve used a light successfully, you’re more apt to turn to it again.
Bright sun requires firepower
And that’s what the designer did for the Super Bowl booths and stages. No longer concerned with whether or not the Fuze lights would work and be reliable, he was more concerned with a persistently bright Southern California sun. “The bright sun was our major concern so I needed some firepower”, he explains. “We used the Fuze on several stages but then raised the base illumination with softlights and chose the KL Panels, which I have found are very efficient and very bright. We thought we needed to raise the intensity level but were all pleasantly surprised that the Fuzes did such a great job". Arc source luminaires were also employed on several stages.
Some 70 Fuze Profile CWs were used across all the stages for key and fill lights with 21 KL Panels used for wash and eye lights.
The Fuze has the functionality of a Leko, but brighter — and able to pan and tilt — lighting the talent as the director moved them around. That’s exactly what I needed. The Fuze is a solid, bright light, with great color rendering, and a good shutter assembly, that moves well and is quiet, Size explains.
Softlight
Another important fixture used across many of the Super Bowl stages was softlight illumination. Chris comments that many of the more popular softlights in use today are too bulky and with more broadcasts happening in smaller spaces with limited ceiling heights, a more compact form factor is often required.
“The KL Panel has a really nice profile, short and contained that allows it to more easily fit in a tight space. We were asked to provide a couple of lights for the makeup room and the easiest thing was to grab a couple of KL Panels”, he recounts. Size agrees, stating, "Often we’re using these instruments in places where you need to adjust it at the light and next to the camera. It’s an excellent feature”.
The KL Panel is a full-color-spectrum panel with stepless color temperature adjustment from 2,000K to 10,000K and high CRI and TLCI indexes. Additional color tuning is possible through a green shift adjustment and a virtual gel library. It houses an efficient RGBW + Lime + Cyan LED array and outputs 24,000 lumens for wonderful soft white or full-color washes.
Elation was delighted to contribute to a successful Super Bowl production in its home base market of LA and is grateful for the cooperation with CT and LDG. Size concludes, “Over the years, we’ve come to find that Elation has raised the bar on technology and quality of product and I’m happy to use the fixtures. Many designers who didn’t know the lights until the Super Bowl were pleasantly pleased and we were even surprised how great they performed”.
