Cast Lighting
, a subsidiary of Cast Group, will set up and oversee the complex lighting requirements for CBC’s English and French Home Base coverage of the Winter Games in Salt Lake City during January and February 2002. The events will be broadcast live on CBC for approximately 16 hours a day for the duration of the Games. This is the second time Cast has been invited to participate in the Olympics; Cast also supported the opening and closing ceremonies of the 2000 Sydney Olympics, by providing full WYSIWYG pre-planning and visualization tools.
“We are very excited to be involved with these Winter Games,” said Gilray Densham, President, Cast Group. “We have considerable experience working on these sorts of events. In addition to the Sydney Olympics, we used our WYSIWYG technology to help program the Opening and Closing ceremonies of the 1999 Pan Am Games in Winnipeg. These 2002 Games mark the first time we have been involved with Winter Olympics.”
Cast will be represented at the Games by Allyn Terry, Lighting Director/Designer and Russ Widdall as Board Operator/Assistant. Pre-planning of the studios will take place in Toronto. Terry and Widdall will spend some two months on site in Salt Lake City with the set-up and managing of the studios. These studios will have numerous configurations in order to accommodate the various broadcasting needs.
For the 2000 Sydney Olympics Cast, created a Super-WYSIWYG system that allowed the lighting designer to pre-cue the opening and closing ceremonies off-site. Some of these cues were used directly via WYSIWYG’s computer-generated format and, once executed on stage, did not require additional adjustments. The custom-made, 17,000-channel WYSIWYG system simulated 32 universes of DMX. It also allowed the eight board operators to see more than just the performance of their own lights – they were also able to see what the other operators were doing as well.
Cast Lighting has contributed to many high profile events including the Juno Awards, Ricky Martin road show and the relighting of the Canadian Senate Chamber. Cast Group is headquartered in Toronto, Ontario and has an extensive WYSIWYG sales distribution network throughout the world. Cast’s partner and global distributor for the product is Electronic Theatre Controls of Middleton, Wisconsin. In August of this year Cast and WYSIWYG were awarded the coveted Emmy for Outstanding Achievement in Engineering Development by the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences. This marked the first time that a Canadian company had been awarded an Emmy in this category.