NASHVILLE — Video and lighting filled the void left by the absence of traditional scenery for this year’s CMT Music Awards, broadcast live from the Sommet Center. Incorporating the idea of “negative space,” production designer Anne Brahic and LD Allen Branton provided video and lighting including the PRG Bad Boy luminaire for beam effects and to delineate the performers.
Branton had previously used the Bad Boys in his design for the MTV Movie Awards. There they played the role of Hollywood searchlights on the film-inspired set.
“The Bad Boys worked really nicely on the MTV awards because of their smaller size but great intensity,” said Branton. “We used five of them on the floor to emulate movie premiere searchlights. They needed to be in scale with the set and there aren’t many smaller lights that have enough intensity to do that job.”
For the CMT Music Awards, Branton worked closely with Brahic on the “no set” design consisting of video tile ribbons and a visual forest of Versa Tubes floating in dark space.
“We really tried to place the lights in a very surgical, restrained manner so as not to have the lighting and the video elements in competition with each other,” noted Branton. “The Bad Boys were a great tool because they had enough brightness to compete with the video even in vivid colors. We only needed three fixtures as backlight to define the performers against the video background.”
Felix Peralta, lighting director/programmer for the CMT awards, agreed, saying, “They provided a big, hard-edge light that could cut through the video. Allen and I really like the 8-inch aperture of the Bad Boy, it is a nice fat beam that comes out of the light; the output is tremendous. It really provides what Allen likes to call the ‘shock and awe.’”
PRG also provided the VersaTubes, a primary feature of the design, along with five Mbox Extreme media servers, which were programmed by Jason Rudolph. Rudolph used two servers for the Versa Tubes and three for the XL Video F-LED video tiles.
“I have used the Mbox many times in the past and there are a lot of things I like about it,” said Rudolph. “The new version 3 hardware is a vast improvement. It is a good server with a lot of nice functions and it is pretty damn reliable.”
Branton, who worked closely with PRG well in advance of the event, said, “Everything came in and was ready to go, which was great because our time was limited. Everything was handled beautifully. It is really one of the most important things to me, getting people in the boat with you that you can trust and I trust PRG.”
For more information, please visit www.prg.com.
