Scharff Weisberg Lighting Supports New Year's Eve Ball Drop

Scharff Weisberg Lighting

supplied a lighting control package to John Trowbridge for the Times Square 2004 New Year’s Eve celebration. The package, which included two ETC Expression 3 consoles, two High End System Wholehog II’s, and three 48 x 2.4K ETC Sensor racks, was used to control the lighting elements of the event, including the ball and countdown clock.

For 99 years, Times Square has been the center of worldwide attention on New Year's Eve, ever since the owners of One Times Square began in 1904 to conduct rooftop celebrations to usher in the New Year. The first Ball Lowering celebration occurred in 1907, and this tradition is now a universal symbol of welcoming the New Year. Today, the Ball is a geodesic sphere, six feet in diameter, and weighing approximately 1,070 pounds. It is covered with a total of 504 Waterford crystal triangles. For the last eight years, John Trowbridge has been involved in the event, most recently as production manager of the ball drop.

“I’ve worked with Scharff Weisberg Lighting on a number of recent jobs,” comments Trowbridge, “and they have been great. The gear is in excellent shape, they provide full support and Ben [general manager, Ben Saltzman] and Ron [operation manager, Ron Brodeur] are great to deal with. For this job, Ron also came through with some last minute custom designed and built strobe controllers.”

The complete package supplied by Scharff Weisberg included the Expression 3’s to control the lighting inside the ball and “2004” sign, and the Wholehog II’s to control supporting lights, the three 48 x2.4k ETC Sensor racks and all of the electrical power distribution.