freedom
24th March 2007, 05:53 AM
Staging Super Bowl XLI
Written by Dan Daley March 19, 2007
http://www.plsn.com/mambots/content/mosthumb/thumbs/Feature_Story_Super_Bowl_0307_superbowl-pic.jpg (http://javascript<b></b>:thumbWindow('http://www.plsn.com/images/stories/Feature_Story/Super_Bowl_0307/superbowl-pic.jpg','Image',400,300,0,0);)Putting Prince Together in Five Minutes or Less
At Super Bowl XLI, the pieces of the puzzle all came together — and they did it in five hectic minutes in the glare of the sharpest media scrutiny on earth. Even the union grips grunted in admiration as 300 volunteers pushed, pulled and cajoled the 16 pieces of what would become the glyph-shaped stage for Prince’s performance as the halftime headliner at the matchup last February between the Bears and the Colts at Miami’s Pro Player Stadium.
“This is unlike any other gig you’ll ever do, and every year there’s something different, and it just keeps getting bigger and more complicated,” states Cap Spence, staging manager for Don Mischer Productions, which jointly produced the pre-game and halftime entertainment for the Super Bowl event with White Cherry Entertainment.
Before Spence gave a guided tour of the carts that carried the jigsaw puzzle of a stage out to the field, he went over a scale model of the stadium and its outside perimeter, modeled by draftsman Doug Cook. The 16 pieces of varying sizes that would make up the symbol the musician had used for most of the 1990s instead of his name would proceed from the staging area in precise order, conveyed by 300 of the 15,000 volunteers who provide the bulk of the Super Bowl’s manpower pool each year. Using a few of the scaled pieces to illustrate, Spence moved a couple of them down the wide player entrance tunnel that leads to the field. It gets interesting at the other end of the tunnel, when they have to make a sharp turn to avoid the goal posts and then turn out onto the field. The first few made the turn easily, but the next one was too large and was oddly shaped. Spence began to make the kind of moves remembered from parallel parking classes in driver’s ed. “It’s like maneuvering a couch into an apartment,” he says. “A quarter of the pieces are too large to make the turn in one move. We have to get all 16 of them from the staging area through the tunnel, around the goal posts, to the middle of the field, position them perfectly and lock them in, connect all the lighting, audio, power and pyro connections, and get out of the way, all in under six minutes. If they even touch the goal posts, the officials will have to completely re-measure their position again and have both teams sign off on it. That’s never happened before, and you don’t want to be the one it does happen to.”
Spence and staging coordinators Marcus Lopez, Graham Lagden, Scott Chase, George McPherson and Doug Cook supervised the training of the volunteers, rehearsing the stage assembly over the course of two weeks, each run getting progressively faster until they hit the magic under-six-minute mark. He recalled other Super Bowls with their own unique challenges, such as the 400-foot-long tunnel in Detroit last year that was angled downhill, with a dogleg at the end, and that met its stage with a field full of snow, or the massive video walls and 14 on-field 35-foot-tall lighting structures for Paul McCartney’s performance in Jacksonville in 2005, which required 800 volunteers to move into place.
The stage design was stipulated by Prince and executed by B&R Scenery, which has done similar stage construction for the Super Bowl for the past five years, a fact that Brian Sullivan, president of B&R, is quick to attribute to his team. The stage’s steel frame construction holds both wood stage material and custom- cut plastic covers over the light boxes in most of the carts, which held over 500 Color Blaster LED units. Certain stage components have drop shelves on the side that are unfolded once past the goal posts to hold audio monitor wedges and, in one case, a small platform from which Prince’s guitar technician would hand off the three guitar changes the performer made during the show. Specialized tires minimize damage to the grass, which is critical since there is still one half of the most important football game of the year still to be played.
Beneath the stage pieces were the pyro and propane components. Ron Smith, of Pyro Spectaculars, headed a 17- person crew and had two pyro controllers positioned in the scoreboards at either end of the field, flanking his main position on the 50-yard line. A Pyro Digital system controlled the firing of the nearly 2,000 pyrotechnic effects from 72 pyro unit locations surrounding the stadium, the light towers and the scoreboards, which was scripted by Show Director software. From the four large accumulator tanks beneath four of the carts, a 30- foot propane ball effect shot out from the bottom plane of the stage, followed by about 200 gerbs surrounding the stage and others on top of the stadium walls. The program ran on FSK time code on an XLR audio cable fed by P.A. provider ATK AudioTek, which also connected pyro to the intercom grid.
Bruce Rodgers, a Parnelli Award winner who was working on his first Super Bowl event, designed the production design, stage set and its accoutrements. Rodgers created storyboards and sketches and then presented these concepts to the executive producers Don Mischer, Ricky Kirshner and Glenn Weiss, and lighting designer Bob Dickinson, who worked with Prince’s team to script the performance’s pyro timing, special effects cues, choreograph the movements of the 2,000 “fans” who would rush the stage and the Florida A&M University marching band, with details down to the battery-powered light strips that were sewn onto their uniforms, which would light up as they accompanied Prince during the finale.
Rodgers says he wanted the set to be self-illuminated entirely by an LED-driven lighting design, and he and Dickinson specified more than 500 pieces of Color Blasters in light boxes in the carts and VersaTubes light chases to ring the perimeter of the stage, which were provided by PRG. In fact, he says, the lighting design depends on them. “You would usually see a stage at an event like this illuminated with raised lighting structures and sources pointing down at the stage,” he explains. “This is uplit, using mostly the lights from the stage itself and the four football-shaped truss carts that carried 12 Falcon Xenon lights that gave the show its atmospheric shafts of light. The set and its look depends a lot on shadows, and it’s very dramatic.” The stage’s own high point came near the end of the last song, when a 30-foot by 28-foot blowing silk effect was launched from a curved cart on the horned edge of the stage, with 18 E-Fans supporting the silk and illuminated from behind with a 20K flood light, projecting a larger- than-life silhouette of Prince towards the south side of the stadium.
A 20k Fresnel with the lens and reflector removed illuminated the silk effect, says David Grill, lighting director for the program. He and lighting designer Bob Dickinson fleshed out Rodgers’ stage concept, using 47 half-meter and 129 1- meter Element Labs’ VersaTubes to outline the stage with a video-driven purple (of course) outline, and with 287 Color Kinetics Color Blast LED units tucked into light boxes aboard the carts to create the stage’s fat band of light. There were also Gladiator 3k follow-spots for key lighting spread around the stadium.
Grill and Dickinson worked from the video truck during the show, calling cues to Matt Firestone, who had programmed the dozen Xenotech 7K lights on the field and the in-stadium lighting, which used Mac 2K PCs and VL-5 arc lights mounted to the balcony railing, and Mark Butts, who programmed the Falcon arc lights and stage equipment. Both worked from Virtuoso VX consoles with DX backups and a Catalyst Pro v4 media server, all positioned above the 50-yard line.
The real challenge to the lighting was trying to approximate the end result without a stage in its final position in darkness until the sole dress rehearsal on the Thursday before the game. “Until then, Mark was in the stage tent during the day programming the Color Blasts and the VersaTubes, and Matt was in the stadium at night programming the field system,” Grill recalls. “The first time the two of them could coordinate their programming and focuses in real time and see it work was that dress rehearsal.”
Even the dress run-through had its limitations, with the stadium’s turf covered with a light-colored tarp spread across the entire field. “We had to adjust for the reflectivity of the tarp and estimate what the actual green grass would do with the light,” Grill says, adding that the fact that the rehearsal included the 2,000 scripted fans helped immensely in determining light levels.
Despite the relentless rain that drummed down on Pro Player Stadium that Sunday night, the halftime show went off without a hitch. The technology worked perfectly. But as Cap Spence puts it, “It doesn’t matter unless the people pull it off perfectly, too. And they did.”
Source: PLSN (http://www.plsn.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1669&Itemid=1)
Written by Dan Daley March 19, 2007
http://www.plsn.com/mambots/content/mosthumb/thumbs/Feature_Story_Super_Bowl_0307_superbowl-pic.jpg (http://javascript<b></b>:thumbWindow('http://www.plsn.com/images/stories/Feature_Story/Super_Bowl_0307/superbowl-pic.jpg','Image',400,300,0,0);)Putting Prince Together in Five Minutes or Less
At Super Bowl XLI, the pieces of the puzzle all came together — and they did it in five hectic minutes in the glare of the sharpest media scrutiny on earth. Even the union grips grunted in admiration as 300 volunteers pushed, pulled and cajoled the 16 pieces of what would become the glyph-shaped stage for Prince’s performance as the halftime headliner at the matchup last February between the Bears and the Colts at Miami’s Pro Player Stadium.
“This is unlike any other gig you’ll ever do, and every year there’s something different, and it just keeps getting bigger and more complicated,” states Cap Spence, staging manager for Don Mischer Productions, which jointly produced the pre-game and halftime entertainment for the Super Bowl event with White Cherry Entertainment.
Before Spence gave a guided tour of the carts that carried the jigsaw puzzle of a stage out to the field, he went over a scale model of the stadium and its outside perimeter, modeled by draftsman Doug Cook. The 16 pieces of varying sizes that would make up the symbol the musician had used for most of the 1990s instead of his name would proceed from the staging area in precise order, conveyed by 300 of the 15,000 volunteers who provide the bulk of the Super Bowl’s manpower pool each year. Using a few of the scaled pieces to illustrate, Spence moved a couple of them down the wide player entrance tunnel that leads to the field. It gets interesting at the other end of the tunnel, when they have to make a sharp turn to avoid the goal posts and then turn out onto the field. The first few made the turn easily, but the next one was too large and was oddly shaped. Spence began to make the kind of moves remembered from parallel parking classes in driver’s ed. “It’s like maneuvering a couch into an apartment,” he says. “A quarter of the pieces are too large to make the turn in one move. We have to get all 16 of them from the staging area through the tunnel, around the goal posts, to the middle of the field, position them perfectly and lock them in, connect all the lighting, audio, power and pyro connections, and get out of the way, all in under six minutes. If they even touch the goal posts, the officials will have to completely re-measure their position again and have both teams sign off on it. That’s never happened before, and you don’t want to be the one it does happen to.”
Spence and staging coordinators Marcus Lopez, Graham Lagden, Scott Chase, George McPherson and Doug Cook supervised the training of the volunteers, rehearsing the stage assembly over the course of two weeks, each run getting progressively faster until they hit the magic under-six-minute mark. He recalled other Super Bowls with their own unique challenges, such as the 400-foot-long tunnel in Detroit last year that was angled downhill, with a dogleg at the end, and that met its stage with a field full of snow, or the massive video walls and 14 on-field 35-foot-tall lighting structures for Paul McCartney’s performance in Jacksonville in 2005, which required 800 volunteers to move into place.
The stage design was stipulated by Prince and executed by B&R Scenery, which has done similar stage construction for the Super Bowl for the past five years, a fact that Brian Sullivan, president of B&R, is quick to attribute to his team. The stage’s steel frame construction holds both wood stage material and custom- cut plastic covers over the light boxes in most of the carts, which held over 500 Color Blaster LED units. Certain stage components have drop shelves on the side that are unfolded once past the goal posts to hold audio monitor wedges and, in one case, a small platform from which Prince’s guitar technician would hand off the three guitar changes the performer made during the show. Specialized tires minimize damage to the grass, which is critical since there is still one half of the most important football game of the year still to be played.
Beneath the stage pieces were the pyro and propane components. Ron Smith, of Pyro Spectaculars, headed a 17- person crew and had two pyro controllers positioned in the scoreboards at either end of the field, flanking his main position on the 50-yard line. A Pyro Digital system controlled the firing of the nearly 2,000 pyrotechnic effects from 72 pyro unit locations surrounding the stadium, the light towers and the scoreboards, which was scripted by Show Director software. From the four large accumulator tanks beneath four of the carts, a 30- foot propane ball effect shot out from the bottom plane of the stage, followed by about 200 gerbs surrounding the stage and others on top of the stadium walls. The program ran on FSK time code on an XLR audio cable fed by P.A. provider ATK AudioTek, which also connected pyro to the intercom grid.
Bruce Rodgers, a Parnelli Award winner who was working on his first Super Bowl event, designed the production design, stage set and its accoutrements. Rodgers created storyboards and sketches and then presented these concepts to the executive producers Don Mischer, Ricky Kirshner and Glenn Weiss, and lighting designer Bob Dickinson, who worked with Prince’s team to script the performance’s pyro timing, special effects cues, choreograph the movements of the 2,000 “fans” who would rush the stage and the Florida A&M University marching band, with details down to the battery-powered light strips that were sewn onto their uniforms, which would light up as they accompanied Prince during the finale.
Rodgers says he wanted the set to be self-illuminated entirely by an LED-driven lighting design, and he and Dickinson specified more than 500 pieces of Color Blasters in light boxes in the carts and VersaTubes light chases to ring the perimeter of the stage, which were provided by PRG. In fact, he says, the lighting design depends on them. “You would usually see a stage at an event like this illuminated with raised lighting structures and sources pointing down at the stage,” he explains. “This is uplit, using mostly the lights from the stage itself and the four football-shaped truss carts that carried 12 Falcon Xenon lights that gave the show its atmospheric shafts of light. The set and its look depends a lot on shadows, and it’s very dramatic.” The stage’s own high point came near the end of the last song, when a 30-foot by 28-foot blowing silk effect was launched from a curved cart on the horned edge of the stage, with 18 E-Fans supporting the silk and illuminated from behind with a 20K flood light, projecting a larger- than-life silhouette of Prince towards the south side of the stadium.
A 20k Fresnel with the lens and reflector removed illuminated the silk effect, says David Grill, lighting director for the program. He and lighting designer Bob Dickinson fleshed out Rodgers’ stage concept, using 47 half-meter and 129 1- meter Element Labs’ VersaTubes to outline the stage with a video-driven purple (of course) outline, and with 287 Color Kinetics Color Blast LED units tucked into light boxes aboard the carts to create the stage’s fat band of light. There were also Gladiator 3k follow-spots for key lighting spread around the stadium.
Grill and Dickinson worked from the video truck during the show, calling cues to Matt Firestone, who had programmed the dozen Xenotech 7K lights on the field and the in-stadium lighting, which used Mac 2K PCs and VL-5 arc lights mounted to the balcony railing, and Mark Butts, who programmed the Falcon arc lights and stage equipment. Both worked from Virtuoso VX consoles with DX backups and a Catalyst Pro v4 media server, all positioned above the 50-yard line.
The real challenge to the lighting was trying to approximate the end result without a stage in its final position in darkness until the sole dress rehearsal on the Thursday before the game. “Until then, Mark was in the stage tent during the day programming the Color Blasts and the VersaTubes, and Matt was in the stadium at night programming the field system,” Grill recalls. “The first time the two of them could coordinate their programming and focuses in real time and see it work was that dress rehearsal.”
Even the dress run-through had its limitations, with the stadium’s turf covered with a light-colored tarp spread across the entire field. “We had to adjust for the reflectivity of the tarp and estimate what the actual green grass would do with the light,” Grill says, adding that the fact that the rehearsal included the 2,000 scripted fans helped immensely in determining light levels.
Despite the relentless rain that drummed down on Pro Player Stadium that Sunday night, the halftime show went off without a hitch. The technology worked perfectly. But as Cap Spence puts it, “It doesn’t matter unless the people pull it off perfectly, too. And they did.”
Source: PLSN (http://www.plsn.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1669&Itemid=1)