80th Annual Academy Awards Show
PRG provides award winning services and products for both live and televised events.
The Challenge: Supply support and production equipment that would be fast, flexible and dependable for the 80th Annual Academy Awards®.
The Solution: PRG worked closely with Bob Dickinson and Full Flood, Inc. on the Oscars®, held at the Kodak Theatre in Los Angeles. Dickinson’s choice of lighting equipment was influenced by elements of Roy Christopher’s set design, which dictated clever lighting solutions. “The scale of the scenery, over 40 ft tall, drove our rig to a trim height of about 50 ft. This is unheard of in a theatrical-venue television broadcast such as the Oscars,”Dickinson commented. “I chose VL3500™ Wash, VL3500™ Spot and MAC 2000 Wash™ fixtures as the main type of instrumentation to light the scenery. Of course we still used an ample quantity of VL5™ units.” Dickinson had PRG provide the automated fixtures as part of the overall lighting package.
Dickinson also chose the PRG Virtuoso® control console. “Virtuoso is the fastest and most intuitive console on the market. It is an ideal console for television work, because a single operator on a single console can control up to a thousand instruments,”Dickinson said. Lighting Director and Programmer Andy O’Reilly commented, “Its speed is unbelievable; how fast you can edit your cues once they’re built.”
PRG also supplied its Series 400® Power and Data Distribution System for the production, giving the team an easy way to make changes onsite. O’Reilly explained, “Series 400 saved us a lot of time by providing flexibility up in the rig when we needed to make adjustments.”