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. “One of the things I realized early on was that for the scenic design to be presented purely, the lighting design needed to be fairly minimal to avoid the lighting and video elements competing visually,” explained Branton. 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. “Allen and I talked about using negative space and not having a tremendous amount of traditional moving lights,” explained Brahic. “He didn’t want huge, visible trusses of lights augmenting everything. He carefully placed the actual lights to make them physically minimal in the overall picture.” 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. There they played the role of Hollywood searchlights on the glamorous film-inspired set. “The Bad Boys worked really nicely on the MTV awards because of their smaller size but great intensity,” said Branton. “On the CMT awards the Bad Boys were a great tool because they had enough brightness even in vivid colors. 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,” noted Branton. “I have fewer fixtures in general deployed around the space then I ever have for a show in a venue of that size, especially in a show with this many musical performances. 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.”
Felix Peralta, Lighting Director/Programmer for the CMTs, was equally impressed with the Bad Boys. “They provided a big, hard-edge light that could cut through the video,” he said. “Allen and I really like the 8″ aperture of the Bad Boy. It is a nice fat beam that comes out of the light; the output is tremendous. We were initially concerned that we wouldn’t really be able to see the beams coming out of the upstage units with all the video going but the Bad Boys were very successful in cutting through all that to really still make a statement. It really provided what Allen likes to call the ’shock and awe.’”
The video elements of the show were the primary scenic pieces so Brahic used them to shape the space. “The Versa Tubes were strung together almost like mobiles from the ceiling,” described Brahic. “Figuring out how to make it work technically was a challenge because we were spreading them out all over the place. I drew pretty pictures; but the crew from PRG-they had to figure out how to make it work and they did.”
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.”
Branton worked closely with PRG well in advance of the event. “Everything came in and was ready to go, which was great because our time was limited,” he explained. “Everything was handled beautifully. It is really one of the most important things to me, getting people in the boat with you that you can trust and I trust PRG.”