Atomic’s tests revealed that Clay Paky’s Alpha 800 Profile moving beam shaper was “incredibly quiet. It was the shutterable, hard-edge light we were looking for and the fact that it was small and quiet put it over the top,” says Lawson. “It became our hard-edge workhorse light.”
Branton and his team deployed 60 Alpha 800s. “They were back lights on scenery everywhere, side lights on towers, low shin dance lights and in the overhead truss,” he points out.
Creativity had to be sharp. Twenty Sharpys were also selected. The Clay Paky contingent formed about half of the total automated fixtures on the show. “With every production we try to find more ways to use Sharpy,” says Lawson.
“Everyone has seen its famous pencil beams, and we used them in the Emerald City ballet, which was staged in a nightclub with Sharpy in its Sharpy mode. But we also used Sharpys extensively with frost, with gobos, dappling the scenery with a wonderful quality of light that punches through other treatments.”
Programming challenges were great. Branton, Lawson and Peralta worked with lighting programmers Kirk Miller and Eric Marchwinski to program the show on two grandMA2 light consoles running v. 3.1.2.5 software; an extra desk was on hand as back up.
“We prefer to use the grandMA2 light for TV because we use it with fader wing, and it adapts easily to our configuration of TV monitors. Our workflow is designed around it,” says Peralta.
“We had the luxury of a lot of time for this production, so come show day we were ready to run the whole show in one cue stack,” he notes. “We integrated a lot of show control through grandMA2, too. The console triggered a lot of events on the video side via MIDI show control, and it worked very well.”
Pre-production challenges were great. Peralta points out that he and Marchwinski spent a week in New York City doing pre-viz with MA 3D before moving on site at Grumman Studios.
“Earlybird Visual built our 3D models, which allowed us to envision all the scenes we’d see during rehearsals on the single stage with the LED wall and set pieces tracking in and out. That helped us to spot any potential pitfalls and get a good grasp of the lighting before the load in at Grumman. We got a head start and were in good shape when we arrived at the studio.”
Peralta says, “One of the best things about the MA2 platform is its ability to get to the end result so quickly. It can easily adapt to everyone’s workflow. So much that once rehearsals were winding down and we were at the point where Kirk or Eric were basically playing back the show, I was able to focus on making adjustments while looking at the TV monitors without having the production wait for us. The platform, the system and the software are just that solid.”
