Making a “simple wall of light,” uncluttered by any scenic pieces or barriers, and not disrupted by any restrictions has been a long-held dream of Crt Birsa. “It was on my wish list,” said the cofounder of Blackout Lighting Design “I’ve always wanted to create a simple wall of light, very populated, mathematical, and clean – That’s it!”
Birsa got the opportunity to create such a wall when he lit EMA 2025 , the Slovenian national Eurovision pre-selection event, which is held at Studio 1 of Slovenian National Television in Ljubljana. The results speak for themselves. Working with his fellow Blackout designer Anze Trstenjak, and frequent collaborator, set designer Greta Godnic, he created a 3D light wall that actually acts more like a window – a window that opens the imagination to unlimited vistas of mind bending shapes, light angles and color combinations, all while supporting the performances of the Eurovision contestants.
Although Birsa’s “simple wall” flowed seamlessly while delivering breathtaking looks, controlling it was a complex task, one he handled skillfully with help from his ChamSys MagicQ MQ250M Stadium Console, MagicQ Stadium Connect PC based programming interface, and a backup MQ70 console. Also helping Birsa was multicamera director, Tina Novak of RTV (Slovenia’s national TV network), and LED content creator VJ Andrej Intihar (“VJ Rasta”).
“When you have so many fixtures in play, you and your team have to be very careful in terms of geometry,” explained Birsa. “The key in making this kind of clean look is to take bigger groups of lighting fixtures and run them as if they were a single fixture. Of course, then you can make individual effects within these groups.”
Birsa explained how his ChamSys console helped him achieve this design vision in his 32-universe show, which involved 358 lighting fixtures, many of them on studio hoists, in a relatively small space. “To begin with, it’s very easy to use the network session with ChamSys. One of our universes contained key lights and show lights, so we had to share it, which worked out like a charm with ChamSys.”
“Also, updating the patch offset was very important for this show, since it had so many moving fixtures, and the ChamSys helped there as well,” continued Birsa. “The majority of the looks did not need a lot of position correcting after the patch offset was updated. The whole show was made in group-based programming. This made it clean, straightforward. Then, when it came to updating the show and replacing fixtures, we could do that very easily. The console made all the programming simpler, faster and more fun. This is very important, especially at high profile TV shows where you are usually time limited and changes have to be applied very quickly.”
Birsa notes that EMA 2025 was probably the biggest set ever run at TV Slovenia 1 Studio. His “wall of light,” which was made up of 200 fixtures was at the back of the studio. There was also a matrix of spots and washes mounted on ladders lined on the side with LED strips, and a line of strobes at the bottom.
“All the other fixtures, which were on the studio hoist, just followed this architecture,” said Birsa. “So ,when a certain pattern was in play, we could add a lot of fixtures without making it look crowded. But the biggest challenge in this was not to look too bright with such big amount of lights in such a small space. So, I had to be very careful in programming, which made me glad to have ChamSys.”
Further information about ChamSys: www.chamsysusa.com
