LONDON – Lighting rental company Blinding Light supplied lighting equipment, trussing and rigging for the BBC's 2010 Proms in the Park in Hyde Park. That event was followed a day later by an Elvis tribute concert and, a week later, by an appearance and prayer vigil by Pope Benedict XVI. Blinding Light won the bid to provide gear to Mantaplan for Proms in the Park, an eclectic musical event that coincides with the Last Night of the Proms at London's Royal Albert Hall. LD Anthony "Turbo" Hall, who has lit London's Proms In The Park for the last nine years, specified the rig.
"We enjoyed working with Turbo and his team enormously," said Blinding Light's Patrick Stacey. "Blinding Light has recently moved to new larger premises, and is now better enabled to provide a far-greater level of production and designer support.
"It was a fantastic opportunity to use all our resources within the first few weeks of the move – to supply everything needed for this show efficiently and thoroughly" Stacey added. The project required support from a wide range of suppliers, and Blinding Light sub-hired lighting equipment through Elstree Light and Power, and rigging from Outback.
The key to the lighting design was flexibility. The day after Proms in The Park, the 40-meter-wide stage (supplied by Serious Stages Ltd.) and lighting rig needed to be used for an Elvis tribute concert, and, a week later, for an appearance and prayer vigil by Pope Benedict XVI.
For The Proms, meanwhile, the design needed to cover all bases and complement a range of music genres, lighting the BBC Concert Orchestra and a selection of soloists including Dame Kiri Te Kanawa and Jose Carreras, plus musical guests Brian May and Kerry Ellis, along with singer/songwriter Neil Sedaka. In addition, the final design also had to provide illumination for the set, designed by Hattie Spice.
Turbo's crew sub-hung six straight trusses from the roof structure to facilitate above-stage lighting positions, plus two upstage/downstage trusses for cable management and some smaller trusses in the center, specifically for set lighting. Another four smaller trusses were rigged towards the edge of the stage, used for hanging side lighting for the downstage areas.
The basic lighting rig building block was a PAR can wash – corrected for the cameras – which was created using 36 bars of 6, dotted all over the roof space. A selection of these were focused almost directly downwards and used to section off the orchestra. The moving lights were layered on top of this wash for eye candy, texturing and effects.
This year, the roof had a high trim height and the set a flat floor, so there was plenty of scope for lighting to fill in some of the spaces in between. One of these was upstage of the orchestra, where Turbo placed 14 Vari*Lite VL3000s on the back of the risers for mid level beam-work. They were joined by another 6 VL3000s in the air.
The main workhorses of the rig were 36 Martin Professional MAC 2000 Performance fixtures, used for set illumination below, along with 36 MAC 2000 Washes and 36 MAC 2000 Profile fixtures arranged alternately on the cross stage bars for coverage.
Turbo also used Clay Paky's Alpha Beam 300s, eight of which were positioned down the sides of the stage. Across the back, also at high level, were 14 Clay Paky Alpha Beam 700s, used for punching through tight beams of lighting in the livelier numbers.
Martin 301 LED washes were used on the front truss to produce some twinkly effects into the audience, who were generally lit with nearly 80 8-lites dotted around the auditorium, hung on the delay and video towers, FOH and spotlight platforms, and so on. These worked effectively with the crane camera long shots as the camera swooped in from the back of the auditorium.
In addition to this show, Turbo had to consider how the rig could be used for the Elvis show the next day, and also the Pope's address the following weekend, when finalizing his design. For the Pope's visit, they had to re-position and re-rig some of the trusses.
All the moving lights for Proms In The Park were run on a grandMA full size console, with another running in full tracking backup, operated by Martin Seymour and connected over a network with three NSPs. Turbo ran all the generics off a Road Hog Full Boar, with Arnaud Stephenson (Cookie) operating lights for the Elvis show.
For more information, please visit www.blinding-light.co.uk .
