Did you happen to see a snowman asking a group of Democratic presidential candidates about global warming? If you did, then you were watching the CNN/YouTube Democratic Presidential Debate. I had the opportunity to work on the event, but this time I was the lighting programmer, and I was not involved in the video production. But it’s interesting to note how a production changes when there is video in the mix.
The use of video made a huge impact on the debate. Candidates had to field questions from the American public instead of from a moderator, and all the questions were submitted through YouTube. CNN and YouTube selected a range of topics and presented these questions by video to the candidates in front of a live television audience. None of the questions were shared with the candidates ahead of time. The result was a fasci-nating piece of American political history and live entertainment.
The importance of video in this event reflects a current trend in all areas of entertainment. Most major concerts these days rely on heavy use of video images to support a message or to supplement the visual effects. Video is being used in theatre for virtual sets, and churches incorporate video for I-Mag and to assist the audience with the words to songs and passages. It seems almost inevitable that video would become the focus of one of our political processes as well.
From a production standpoint, this show was fairly straightforward regarding the equipment and set. Ten podiums were arranged onstage in a semicircle with a curved walkway downstage for host Anderson Cooper. Upstage of the podiums was a wall of “cubes,” and each cube was il-luminated from within by incandescent lamps. The YouTube video clips were presented on a large projection screen positioned offstage right, with Cooper’s home-base camera and mark stage right of the screen. All our stage lighting had to be adjusted so that the screen was not impacted or obscured, which required much fine-tuning of our stage and audience lighting through the three days of production and mock rehearsals.
CNN Resident Lighting Designer Michael Poley specified a mix of lighting fixtures to cover the event, including Vari*Lite VL1000s, one for each podium, due to their framing capabilities and color temperature. A mix of conventional lighting, as well as other lighting fixtures, including Martin MAC 700s, MAC 250s, and Coemar 1200s, were used for lighting audience, set and camera shots, filling out the look and balancing the camera shots. During the debate, the LD sat in the production truck and called out level adjustments according to what he saw on camera or what was requested by the director. On this show, I programmed the automated lighting on a Martin Maxxyz console, and gaf-fer/board op Jeff Gregson handled the conventional lighting via an ETC Expression. It was easy to make adjustments on the fly with these consoles. The main adjustments were watching for unwanted shadows on the candidates’ faces, as well as keeping Cooper evenly lit as he walked about the stage.
All the YouTube clips were controlled from within the highly off-limits CNN production truck, so I was not able to view firsthand the magic of how all the videos came together and were played back. The video clips themselves included a range of topics and were selected from thousands of YouTube entries. The clips were projected onto the large screen via HD projectors, and the candidates were able to watch the video questions on the large screen or on a small digital monitor mounted on each podium.
Each candidate was instructed to create a YouTube campaign message; these were shown throughout the debate. The approaches to these videos varied as widely as the candidates themselves. The combination of this unique format with the election process created something groundbreaking.
For those of us in the live event production industry, we should perceive these sorts of events as bellweathers of the industry. Video pro-duction is big and getting bigger all the time. Those who are Internet and computer savvy are the ones who will have the snowman’s attention in the future.
Vickie Claiborne is a freelance programmer and trainer. Visit her at www.vickieclaiborne.com.
