The 2nd annual NFL Honors, a highlight of the events surrounding the Super Bowl, saluted the best players and plays from the 2012 season at the Mahalia Jackson Theatre in New Orleans. The two-hour event the night before the Super Bowl, broadcast live by CBS, featured current and former NFL players along with a range of celebrities to honor the best of the season. To help bringing the energy that the NFL is known for on the field to the award’s stage, lighting designer Bob Dickinson and his team from Full Flood used color and layering to compliment the work of production designer Joe Stewart and art director Tina Miller, both of Shaffner/Stewart Production Design.
Dickinson, who also lit the inaugural NFL Honors in Indianapolis, is an expert at lighting awards shows, especially for live broadcast where the audience is part of the show. “The NFL Honors show is similar to the other awards shows that I light, but every show has a slightly unique audience atmosphere,” says Dickinson. “For this show, we could be a little more edgy with the way we approached the audience lighting. We use backlights that are a little more saturated in color or a little brighter than I might use on other awards shows.” In order to balance the more colorful use of moving lights on the audience, Dickinson layered in ETC Source Four tungsten ellipsoidals for front lighting the audience. This allowed him to render the faces of the featured audience members, including the winners he explains, “When they cut to the audience reactions, you want to be able to see clearly who you are looking at.”
Dickinson’s automated lighting package needed to be carefully selected so it would actually physically fit the footprint around the scenery. “Because of the profile of the scenery, we had to stay with smaller sized instrumentation,” describes Dickinson. “We were actually using more old school moving lights like the [Philips Vari-Lite] VL5, VL5 Arc, [PRG] VL6C+, and [Clay Paky] Sharpys, instrumentation that we could fit in because of the spatial allowances within the set.”
The gaffer was Robert “RJ” Styles, and Lonny MacDougall was the best boy for this production. Full Flood’s Jon Kusner and Travis Hagenbuch were the lighting directors. Harry Sangmeister programmed the automated lighting on the PRG V676® console, and Eric Norris programmed the conventional lighting on an ETC Eos™ 8K console. Dickinson continues, “PRG supplied all the lighting equipment for us. They serviced the show out of their Orlando office, and it worked out quite nicely. PRG is amazing in that if you design your show, like this one for a specific part of the country, they can easily support it with equipment from all their locations. They understand their inventory flow, and PRG will start moving equipment in logical methods—because they always have trucks going one way or the other—to the appropriate shop. So it can all be prepped out of that local shop, even though that location may not have the entire inventory package you need at the start. I find that to be a great plus for working with PRG.”
Stewart’s production design called for a large number of Element Labs’ Versa®Tubes to be used as part of the scenic elements for the NFL Honors. PRG provided the VersaTubes as well as the PRG Mbox Extreme® media server for controlling them. “The VersaTubes were everywhere on the set,” notes Zach Alexander, the media server board operator. “They outlined the screen surrounds; they were behind all of the announcer positions. Anything on the set that looked like neon was VersaTube.” Alexander, who works often with Full Flood, controlled the VersaTubes on the set as a part of the lighting rig. “I ran all of the VersaTubes for the show using the Mbox,” states Alexander. “I used some stock content, some content that I brought, and Bobby [Dickinson] laid out some color palettes that he wanted. I would put up things that he might like and he would say ‘yay or nay.’ I did work with scenic on how to mount the VersaTubes and coordinated with Jason Colbert, the lead VersaTube PRG tech on the installation.”
Alexander started programming the VersaTubes with a console, but he moved over to the PRG Mbox® Director application specifically written as a graphical user interface to control Mbox Extreme media servers from a computer. “I do a fair amount of work on film and commercials with the Mbox,” Alexander says. “I started using the Director software because it’s more like a true video playback system, which for much of what I do works well. For NFL Honors, it made my workflow faster. For this show, I had only one active Mbox, but on that Mbox, I had about 500 parameters that I could adjust. Director lays them all out so you can quickly see what everything is set at. That’s the strength that I find in the Director software.”
Like most productions these days, NFL Honors had very little rehearsal time. “The biggest time challenge was that I had about a day and a half to do all of the looks for all of the bumpers in and out. The thing that saved me was the copy/paste functions in Director; because it’s easier to find any mistakes when I’m creating looks.” The fact that the team have worked together often also helped with the time crunch. “Over time, Full Flood has laid out a flow for how they want these types of shows to go,” comments Alexander. “So, I’ve since adapted that to the media server aspect of the show, which helps speed things up in terms of how the scripts are laid out. Working with Harry [Sangmeister] for so long, I try to do what he does with moving lights so I can follow along. It all looks cohesive since I am working with the same fundamental design building blocks developed by Bobby.”
Since the theatre was underpowered for the needs of this production, extra power was brought in with generators. The lighting team also used PRG Series 400® Power and Data Distribution System to streamline the lighting control layout. “We used the Series 400 system to send power and data for the whole moving light rig,” Alexander says. “It does make life easier for us since we’re running one cable instead of two, and then you can put any DMX address anywhere you want it. As things change, you can easily repatch the system. For the conventionals, we had dimmers but did use the data side of the S400 to bring the conventional console into the network.”
The NFL Honors were well received and everyone is looking forward to this becoming a marquee event during the Super Bowl celebrations for years to come.
Personnel List
Lighting Designer: Bob Dickinson, Full Flood
Lighting Directors: Jon Kusner and Travis Hagenbuch, Full Flood
Production Designer: Joe Stewart, Shaffner/Stewart Production Design
Art Director: Tina Miller, Shaffner/Stewart Production Design
Moving Light Board Operator: Harry Sangmeister
Conventional Lighting Board Operator: Eric Norris
Media Server Board Operator: Zach Alexander
Gaffer: “RJ” Robert Styles
Best Boy: Lonny MacDougall
PRG Project Manager: Megan Flanagan
PRG Lead Tech: Mark Klopper
VersaTube Lead Tech: Justin Colbert
Spot Op/Electrician: Liana “Cap” Capestani
Spot Op/Electrician: Charles Peek II
Lighting Director/Show Administrator: Dave Thibodeau, Full Flood
Full Flood Office Manager: Marie Turner, Full Flood
PRG General Manager: Brian Edwards
PRG Account Manager: Tony Ward
PRG Production Coordinator: Travis Snyder
Gear
Automated Lighting
1 PRG V676 Lighting Console
1 PRG Series 400 Power and Data Distribution System
20 Clay Paky Sharpy Luminaire
132 Vari-Lite VL5 Wash Luminaire
12 Vari-Lite VL5A Luminaire
32 Vari-Lite VL2000 Wash Luminaire
37 Vari-Lite VL3000 Spot Luminaire
19 PRG VL6C+ Luminaire
24 Philips Color Kinetics ColorBlast 12 TR Luminaire
9 Philips Color Kinetics Color Blaze 72 LED Luminaire
16 Coemar LED ParLite
12 Martin Professional Atomic 3000 Strobe
Conventional Lighting
1 ETC Eos 8K Lighting Console
10 ETC Source Four 50°Ellipsoidal
32 ETC Source Four 36° Ellipsoidal
67 ETC Source Four 26° Ellipsoidal
16 ETC Source Four 19° Ellipsoidal
6 ETC Source Four 14° Ellipsoidal
10 ETC Source Four PAR EA
14 Arri 300 Plus Fresnel
16 Arri 650 Fresnel
2 Litepanels 1x1 3,200-5,600K Bi-Color Flood
14 Altman 20”, One-Circuit MR11 Striplight
6 L&E 6’ Three-Circuit Striplight
4 L&E 4’ Two-Circuit Striplight
12 L&E One-Cell Broad Cyc
2 Lycian 1290 XLT 2kW Xenon Followspot
Media Servers and Versa Tubes
1 PRG Mbox Director Control System
2 PRG Mbox Extreme V.3 Media Server
339 Element Labs Versa Tube V21 HD LED, 1m length
32 Element Labs Versa Tube V21 HD LED, 1.5m length