LONDON – Renegade once again provided the lighting and visual design for the 2011 Orange BAFTA (British Academy of Film & TV Arts) Awards gala dinner and after-show party at London's Grosvenor House Hotel. The event, which followed the Awards Ceremony at the Royal Opera House, used multiple spaces in the venue, including the Great Room, the Ballroom, reception and peripheral areas. It is the third year that Renegade's Nick Gray has been involved in designing the event, working for production company AD Events. The challenge was to blend lighting elements from last year's scheme with a new look and feel for the Great Room and other spaces.
Chris Fyfe was Renegade's technical project manager, leading their crew of five and overseeing the load-in and rigging of all the production lighting equipment, which was supplied by White Light. Specialist interior fixtures came from Shok London.
The Great Room hosted the dinner for over 1,000 guests. There, Gray created a breakup effect around the room using 20 Source Four profiles, with an additional 20 Source Fours lighting some tables.
Gray also used the Grosvenor's house lighting rig, which included 28 Vari*Lite 2000 Washes and eight Vari*Lite 2500 spots. He supplemented the house rig with an additional eight Vari*Lite 3000 Spots from White Light.
For uplighting and color-changing for the walls and other features around the room, Gray used 120 wireless battery powered GDS Lightware LED fixtures, which proved to be very quick and easy to deploy.
Programmer Matthew Rimmer used an Avolites Pearl 2004 console for control.
Some of the table centers were between six and eight feet tall, sculpted into themes inspired by the film Inception. These marked a departure from the more classic floral concepts and required the lighting to be more geometric to reflect the table design. The tables were also lit with complementary colors so shadows and reflections could be created in the sculptures' mirror elements.
On arrival, guests initially entered the drinks reception held in the upper area of the Great Room before progressing through to the lower area for dinner. When that was finished, around 11.30 p.m., they were encouraged to proceed into the ballroom, where a DJ helped keep the after-party going.
As part of the entertainment, the guests took in a performance by 1980s alt-pop band Squeeze. This area was sponsored by Soho House, a private club. Lighting needed to be flexible and interesting, covering the stage as well as the dance floor.
The Ballroom stage measured 32 by 24 feet, and it was positioned at one end of the room. Onstage, lights were rigged onto four sections of upright trussing at the back, two at 2.5 meters high and two at 3 meters high. On each truss tower was a Martin Professional MAC 700 Profile moving light, an Atomic strobe, two MAC 101 LED washes and two 4-lite blinders.
Onstage, another two MAC 700 Profiles were positioned left and right of stage, with another two downstage left and right, plus six PAR 56 chrome floor cans. Five Source Four Juniors were rigged on one of the house's overhead scaffolding bars.
Above the dance floor in front of the stage, the Renegade team took advantage of a square configuration of barrel bars, hanging a MAC 700 Spot in each corner. At the back of the room, the bar area was highlighted with two Parnels and 10 house PAR cans on another house bar. The whole room was draped and lit using kitsch-style stand lamps provided by Soho House.
All lighting was controlled via a Hog iPC console. Squeeze's LD, Daniel Bocking operated lights for their set, and the rest of the time the desk/FOH was run for Renegade by Trent O'Connor.
Shok London supplied 84 LED up-lighters and 18 Tom Dixon chrome up-lighters for soft lighting around in peripheral areas, which included four break-out rooms, each lit with a combination of LED and PAR 56 up-lighters.
The bar outside the Ballroom featured another 12 Tom Dixon uplighters, with eight Stem Spots used to accentuate the bar areas and Source Four Parnels picked out the branding and dashboards.
A corridor linking the Ballroom & Great Room was lit with more LED up-lighters matched to the light blue corporate colors of Grey Goose vodka, one of the main sponsors. The reception and lobby areas were also outfitted with Tom Dixon up-lighters.
Although the load in was tight, starting at 9 a.m. Saturday for the Sunday evening party, additional cherry pickers on hand this year helped speed up the rigging process. Everything was ready and focused before 8 p.m. that day, leaving the floor space clear for the tables to be laid out.
"It was brilliant to be involved with such a high profile event again," Gray said. "Our brief was to produce an elegant, eye-catching vibe and ambience for the spaces and the occasion, for which we all built on our previous experiences and added lots of new ideas."
For more information, please visit www.renegadedesign.co.uk.
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