“This is unsafe. Somebody’s going to get hurt.”
Nick Scirocco, the 6-foot-2-inch plain-spoken IATSE Local One crew chief and John Yorke, lighting designer for the Red Bull Snowscrapers event in New York City, were standing at the top of a 90-foot high structure, the wind howling all around them, when Scirocco made this pronouncement. The structure in question was the Red Bull Snowscrapers Snowboarding ramp, a thin composite of plastic and nylon decking sheets at East River Park in Manhattan.
On the climb, the plug-in banisters wobbled flimsily when they were grabbed. Though they weren’t coming out, they couldn’t be tied off to, and if anyone above slipped on the stairs and fell, everyone below would take the 125-foot ride down the steps. That unpleasant thought came to Yorke about 70 feet up as several other people were climbing the steps in front of him. As he reached the top he knew they were in trouble.
After ascending 10 stories of ice-covered stairs in one uninterrupted climb, Yorke proclaimed that for the first time in his 45 years he was honestly scared to death, despite the fact that he spent the better part of his Army infantry service in the open door of a helicopter. It was a calm day 90 feet below, but the wind could gust to 50 mph at the top of the structure and there were no safeties to tie off to.
At the beginning of the day, someone mentioned that a physicist had designed the ramp at such an angle as to provide the maximum speed to launch a snowboarder of average size a certain distance in the air. In the calm light of day, with your feet firmly planted on the ground, this structure made perfect sense. The big 90-foot high ramp, or “in-run,” as it is officially referred to, had an elegant swooping curve on the business end from which the snowboarders would launch. A side view revealed Stackbox Structures’ structural design of stout shipping containers stacked and bolted together. But it was the absence of anything “rigging like” on top of the in-run that concerned both Yorke and Scirocco, and Yorke was glad that Scirocco was the one who stood up and said right off the bat what Yorke knew to be true and wise.
Rising Structure, Rising Doubts
The whole gig had started off when Yorke was called and asked to design the lighting for an Anthrax performance on a Stageline 320 mobile stage for the Red Bull Snowscrapers Event. He had done countless shows on Stageline 320s and this one started out as a simple, straightforward gig. But in a conference call with the client, Red Bull, it was brought to his attention that the in-run needed to be lit along with the rest of the site.
“I looked at these pretty color artist’s renderings of the 90-foot high in-run, the short and steeply curved launch ramp, and the triangular shaped ‘spine’ where the snowboarders ostensibly would land and I was intrigued,” said Yorke. “It was a pretty cool looking project on paper and I was excited by the grand nature of the project.”
Yorke pitched the lighting design for the ramp over the phone and created several renderings of his own, which he then e-mailed to the client. It seemed simple. Not so.
There was a truss structure called the “athlete’s shelter” that had to be built and secured to the top of the in-run. It was originally rendered as a hypothetical design element based on the dimensions of standard medium-duty 20.5-inch box truss.
Yorke had his doubts about it. “One look at this rendering and I asked myself, ‘Why wasn’t this built on the ground, lifted with the giant crane that was piling up shipping containers, and bolted to the top using whatever bolts that had been welded to whatever plates that were secured to whatever it was that was deemed reasonable and safe?”
But hypothetical design elements do not require the same scrutiny as an actual structure does. It was just assumed that it was planned out and signed off on by the same happy physicist who had created the idea for the in-run to begin with. Not so.
“In reality,” Yorke explained, “the athlete’s shelter was nothing more than a pretty picture, an unintentionally deceptive one at that, having been rendered in a CAD program and looking all like it could safely exist on top of a 90-foot high snowboard ramp with a bunch of lights and banners hung from it, a triumph of man’s grasp of engineering, a statement of the human race and its mastery of the laws of science, for all to see and admire, in all its glory, Amen.”
But there stood Scirocco and Yorke, one saying what the other was feeling about the unfolding reality of the situation. One look at the empty nylon deck atop the ramp and the welded bolts intended to secure the truss structure into place and they really wanted to be somewhere else, in a very bad way. The rigging points existed, yes, but were “shamefully inadequate.”
“The simple fact that something was built to that point was impressive,” Yorke said, “but as it turned out, nobody was willing to sign off on it. Suddenly I was filled with a sickening horror that perhaps the whole structure was similarly conceived, that the entire towering, improbable in-run ramp was actually the fiendish design of a mad adolescent snowboarder, probably too young to vote, who had hacked into Stackbox Structures’ design database and was probably watching gleefully right now as the wind shoved us around looking at these impossibly small bolts intended to hold a truss, lighting system and banners without ripping the entire top off the ramp in one fatal gust of wind.”
Luckily, the only real problem was the point of contact; the underlying structure was sufficient to safely support the structure.
Scirocco observed, and Yorke agreed, that management needed to get an engineer up to the structure to evaluate the situation and design a safe and suitable way to anchor the athlete’s shelter in place. Using a set of safeties, ratchet straps and additional hardware, the problem was tackled.
“This engineer—who looked remarkably like Albert Einstein—solved the problem, making it a legitimate part of the in-run ramp,” Yorke said.
Building at Height
Once the rigging problem was taken care of, the athlete’s shelter truss and the deck at the top of the in-run were redesigned and signed off. Then came the construction of the truss, which required a 125-foot manlift slinging the eight-foot sections of truss, two at a time, up to the top of the ramp. Once there, the downstage truss span was built with sectional upright supports that were removed once the span was completed. The upstage span was also built with additional uprights that were not in the original design, but it was decided to leave them in place for extra support and ease of access to hang lights.
Conditions made the construction of the athlete’s shelter a punishing, 16-hour job. “That upstage span edge was over 100 feet from the ground and right against the back rail of the in-run structure,” York said. “I have great respect for the eight union riggers who built the athlete’s shelter. They did a great job!”
For the athlete’s shelter lighting, Yorke specified eight PixelRange PixelLine 110s, 20 Elation LED Tri-Bricks, six Robe ColorSpot 1200s, four Thomas 8-Light Moles, and four Martin Atomic 3K Strobes. The sides of the ramp were lit with 72 1k PAR 64s, which were individually circuited to provide a nice “aircraft runway” chase. The ramp was also framed in 28 six-foot long Color Kinetics Color Blaze LED fixtures, which provided a blue wash with pulses of red cascading down each side of the ramp. On the ground were 12 Robe ColorWash 1200s washing the banners on both sides of the in-run structure, and four 4500-watt Little Big Lites were used to ballyhoo at the base of the launch ramp.
BML crew chief Russell Felton and freelancer Russ Keitel supervised the installation of the lighting in the athlete’s shelter as well as the site lighting at the ramp. Felton also supervised the building of several large video arrays while Keitel managed the operation of the ramp site lighting package. All of the lighting systems were controlled by MA Lighting grandMA consoles.
More Down to Earth
Across the site was the Stageline 320 performance stage. Since the ramp was in the north end of the site and the performance stage was on the south end, it became known on radio traffic as the “South Pole” and the ramp as the “North Pole.” At full trim height of six feet, the area underneath the stage was used for storage and as a crew break area that offered shelter from the snow and freezing rain during the week of construction. The performance stage lighting was designed by Yorke and supervised by Mark “Fifi” Miller (LD for Prince and Poison, among others).
Three 36-foot trusses spanned the stage and 72 1K PAR 64s, six Martin MAC 2000s, some Martin Atomic 3K Strobes, ACL bars and Molefays provided the lighting. According to the crew, the most important aspect of the performance stage lighting package was the addition of about a dozen PARs on non-dim circuits under the stage. They served to heat the crew shelter area under the stage, defrost frozen boots, and, most importantly, to heat Pop Tarts and leftover slices of pizza. On several occasions, they were also used to unfreeze camera boom parts and other mechanical equipment which fell victim to the extreme temperatures.
“Fifi and his gang of four (Jim Daly, Stephen Halouvas, Rob Meier and James “Beef” Abrenica) did a great job,” Yorke enthused. After working all week to build the site, the “gang of four” ran followspots (three Lycian 2ks) for Anthrax in the bitter cold. The crew had been outside for 12 hours before the band took the stage—all of their beverages had frozen solid. The operators said the followspot housings never got warm after running for over six hours.
“It must have been brutal up there,” Yorke noted, “and Fifi’s gang of four deserve great credit for a tough week of freezing cold weather.”
The North Pole lighting crew, dubbed “The Magnificent Eight,” fared no better. They braved a fierce snow and ice storm on Tuesday with a relentless spray of sleet and battering winds.
“I could hardly stand facing the north,” Yorke recounted. “The sleet stung. The eight men who bravely built that structure and hung the lighting rig by hand have my solemn admiration and respect.”
The massive scale of the structure and the harsh weather conditions during site construction combined to make it a memorable production. “Everyone who worked this project deserves great credit and praise for safely and effectively providing an event with outstanding production quality,” Yorke concluded. “Thank you!”
