CMT Awards 2009
PRG’s Bad Boy makes a striking appearance in Nashville.
The Challenge: For a live broadcast television event, illuminate and delineate musicians performing within an innovative video design.
The Solution:
The 2009 CMT Music Awards, broadcast live from the Sommet Center in Nashville, treated viewers to more than some of the hottest acts in country music. Production Designer Anne Brahic and Lighting Designer Allen Branton, whose team also handled the video content, provided a video and lighting driven alternative to traditional scenery while embracing the idea of negative space. Due to the unique nature of the floating video scenery, Branton knew the lighting would need careful consideration. He turned to Production Resource Group (PRG) to provide the support for his meticulous design.
Branton worked closely with Brahic on the ‘no set’ design consisting of XL Video F-LED video tile ribbons and a visual forest of Element Labs™ Versa® Tubes, all floating in dark space. To provide strong beam effects and delineate the performers in this unique visual environment Branton chose to use PRG’s Bad Boy® luminaires as a key player in the lighting design.
Branton had previously used the Bad Boys in his design for the MTV Movie Awards. “On the CMT awards the Bad Boys were a great tool because they had enough brightness even in vivid colors,” said Branton. “We really tried to place the lights in a very surgical, restrained manner so as not to have the lighting and the video elements in competition with each other. I might typically allocate 20 or 30 automated fixtures to some sort of background role, but we only used three Bad Boys as backlight to define the performers against the video background.”
The Versa Tubes and the F-Led were programmed by Jason Rudolph who worked closely with Peralta to not only get the entire show programmed in a tight time frame but also to ensure that the lighting and video complimented each other. Rudolph used five PRG Mbox Extreme® media servers, two for the Versa Tubes and three for the F-LED video tiles. “I have used the Mbox many times in the past and there are a lot of things I like about it,” said Rudolph. “The new version 3 hardware is a vast improvement. It is a good server with a lot of nice functions and it is pretty damn reliable.”