Red Bull Crashed Ice World Championship Final

Every year since the event debuted in 2006, the live finals of Red Bull Crashed Ice World Championship are held in Quebec City's historic old town. Over 100,000 fans are welcomed each time. The course, constructed inside the city walls, starts under the Château Frontenac, goes down the historical streets to finish right next to the Saint Lawrence River. Broadcast on Canada's Rogers sports net, TVA network and Red Bull TV, the live part of the event is very important. However the design also needed to be interesting for the crowd onsite. Another big challenge for the lighting design was to respect the contrast between the old town architecture and an extreme sport-traditional versus modern.

Blackout design is the lighting design firm doing this major event since the first edition in Quebec back in 2006. We have been working with GESTEV, producer of the event, closely to develop a design that will respond to all the demand. The first thing to ensure is to have a beauty shot of the entire city, crowd, and tracking for TV. We also needed to give a party experience to the crowd onsite so they enjoy the show. Last, but not least, we needed to be careful of the residential area in this part of the city. So we had to make choices that will respect the people living there during the setup and still gave us the tool to create a beautiful visual look.

The biggest challenge of this project is to setup a 700m long TV studio in a middle of a living city. Temperature is also one of the big challenges because, with all the technology that is setup outdoors, we need to make sure that everything stays on for the entire show. Multiple TV studios were built along the course that we needed to light, and this is sometimes a big challenge too, as they are in the middle of the street and the crowd.

Blackout decided this edition to add a more eco-energetic solution to the design by using the new VLX from Philips Vari-Lite and a lot of video equipment, such as video projection mapping and LED screens. The video mapping was a great addition to the 2011 edition as it added another texture other than traditional lighting.

Creative Team
GESTEV, Producer
blackoutdesign.ca, Lighting Designer
blackoutdesign.ca, Video Designer
Hubert Gagnon, Head Designer
Meric Messahli, Lighting Director
Dominic Lemieux, Lighting Programmer
Jerome Gagnon, Video Director And Programmer
Martin Genois, Technical Director
Solotech Video, Lighting And Sound Vendor

Equipment
Video

40 Everbrighten BR15 LED Panel
2 Christie Digital Roadster 20K
2 Christie Digital Roadster 10K
2 Coolux Media Server
1 Arkaos Media Server

Lighting
3 MA Lighting grandMA
8 MA Lighting NSP
100 Philips Vari-Lite VL3500 Wash
40 Philips Vari-Lite VL3000 spot
60 Philips Vari-Lite VLX
2 Syncrolite SX3K-2
20 Studio Due city color 1.2K
60 Philips Color Kinetics ColorBlast 12 RGB
80 Ayrton Module 150 AWW
250 PAR 64 1,000W
75 ETC Source Four
200 ETC Source Four PAR
80 Altman ZipStrip ZS3
1000 Quartz Floodlight 500W
24 ETC Sensor+ Touring Dimmer Rack

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