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Soap Stars go G-LEC Mad with PRG Europe
PRG Europe’s been busy recently with a number of live TV shows, and more coming up.
For ITV1’s Soapstar Superstar in mid January, set designer Peter Bingemann, working with lighting designer Al Gurdon, included a whopping 164 sq m of G-LEC PhantomFrame LED screens. Then, shortly afterwards, lighting designer Dave Davey worked with PRG Europe on Dancing on Ice.
“The design for Soapstar Superstar was based on the fact that the competitors on the show are stars of the small screen – hence the design is primarily based around screens,” explains Bingemann. “The set isn’t dissimilar to last year’s, with a few gaps filled in, especially when the camera looks back into the audience, as they tend to with this type of show.
“TV studios always have weight limits in terms of the amount of kit which can be hung from the roof, and we were right up against that limit this time round – so it’s helpful that G-LEC panels are so lightweight, as well as being flexible and easy to use. We also used some PhantomFrames in the backstage area behind a frosted Perspex panel, which gave a really interesting effect. The LEDs on G-LEC work particularly well in the background of close-up shots.”
Al Gurdon adds: “We felt that the first series set a benchmark for this type of show, but that in the ensuing year the bar had been raised, and that the show would need additional investment in state of the art technology in order to move with the times. We put in about 20% more lighting, mainly in the audience areas, which are quite important because of the way these shows are shot, but which are generally fairly low down the pecking order when it comes to placing technology such as moving lights and screens. For a studio of that size, it was pretty big, to the extent that it wouldn’t have looked small in a 10,000 seat arena.”
PRG Europe supplied a huge rig of moving and conventional lights, including over 200 Vari*Lite luminaires, 70 Pixel Line battens and ETC Source Four and Source Four Zooms, along with an Mbox media server, a Virtuoso console and two WholeHog IIs with expansion wings.
Continues Gurdon: “We needed a lighting design that would be versatile enough to produce a variety of mood and dynamics equal to that of the musical performances. Time was a challenge, as each performer would be singing something different each night, and neither the performer nor the production team would know what that would be until the previous evening’s show. The lighting rig was designed to work against what is basically quite a small studio space, by creating a false sense of perspective, everything converging toward an imaginary vanishing point somewhere beyond the back of the studio. The effect of this was to make the studio look much larger than it actually was.”
Gurdon was talking during a break while designing the lighting for the BRIT Awards, to be held at Earl’s Court later in February, another large TV event on which he is working with PRG Europe. PRG Europe also worked at this weekend’s BAFTA awards, lit by Steve Nolan and set design by Peter Bingemann.
Project managers at PRG Europe for Soapstar Superstar were Mick Healey and Loz Wilcox, working with assistant project manager Kelly Cornfield. Dancing on Ice project manager was John McEvoy.
In picture: ITV1’s Dancing on Ice, lit by Dave Davey, working with PRG Europe. photo © ITV
13th February 2007
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