I have gravitated a long way from lighting pop stars live on stage, but the goal is still the same. Make the money look good. There is nothing more exciting than when the stage manager chirps over the walkie-talkie and says, “The show is yours, Mahoney.” I flip on my headset, make sure the spot operators are ready for their first cue, check backstage to make sure dimmer beach and pyro are both ready. After I get “okays” from all departments, I say, “Houselights GO!” The crowd gets loud, the lights go out and we all hit our first cues. “BAM!” We are off and running for the next 90 minutes.
Working with my longtime client, Siemens, there will be none of that old adrenalin. Siemens is the largest engineering company in Europe. They are based in Berlin and Munich, Germany (www.siemens.com). For a client like them, I would typically arrive at the convention center more than two weeks before the show actually opens. I work with a schedule detailing the particulars of the lighting system, and when to get it up and running. It is a fabulous ballet of teamsters, IBEW folks, decorators and local stagehands working together to make this all happen. This world is more about pacing yourself.
Very rarely in the trade show industry will there be pyro, spotlights or ballyhoo. Nevertheless, the client is just as important as a rock star and requires just as much of my attention. The difference between lighting a concert and a corporate event is that my “talent,” at the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA) trade show in Chicago, is now a variety of million dollar machines that help doctors save lives. Strangely, lighting the several machines in a booth as large as a football field is not the challenging part, the challenge lies in lighting the 300-by-24-foot white header that runs through the booth.
Production Partners
Catalyst Exhibits of Pleasant Prairie, WI (www.catalystexhibit.com) continues to build the most impressive booths in the trade show industry, and Rich Korth is the man at the helm of the Siemens booths. This past year, Rich showed me detailed renderings of the booth then asked if lighting this year’s header would be a problem. I said, “Yep, because we have a large portion of the header four feet from the back aisle.” Just a heads up for those that don’t do trade shows, you cannot hang lights outside of your booth’s perimeter without permission from show management. Once you are given permission, you then need to pay for a person to hang each light off house beams or catwalk railings. Depending on the city, this can cost the client anywhere from $250 to $750 per light. I have a 15-foot rule — you need a minimum of 15 feet for an automated or conventional light to properly light a scenic element. This year I was given four feet and was told the header had to be perfect… No shadows, no hot spots, and it also needed to be the brightest element on the show floor. My clients don’t want to hear that there is a problem; they just want the solution.
This is where John Bahnick and Upstaging Lighting come into play. I’ve been working with them lighting corporate events since 1997. We’ve known each other and have had a great working relationship long before that. Upstaging is the sole lighting vendor for any Siemens booth that requires my services at a U.S. trade show. Mahoney Design Inc. will do approximately eight large shows a year for Catalyst Exhibits, so when there is a challenge like we had this past year, everyone brainstorms together for the best possible solution. Usually I will come up with an idea and John and his team will build on it. John has the resources and is a designer in his own right, so his input is priceless. I know of no other company anywhere that would help a designer this much.
I searched through the rental company’s inventory of cycloramas, broad lights and other fixtures with large beam spreads. Unfortunately, they do not own a fixture that would have the proper color temperature and wide beam angle I needed. I did find a single cell cyc fixture used to light banners on auto shows. After doing the math, I would need 162 of these fixtures just to light one side of the header. Due to the Detroit auto show and RSNA event overlapping, I could only get 75 fixtures.
I then reached out to my Siemens client to request permission from RSNA show management. I was asking approval to hang 16 Vari*Lite VL3500 wash fixtures outside of our booth parameters. This would at least light the first 50 feet of header that was closest to the aisle. I could then light the other 250 feet from inside our booth space. After a week, I was informed that they would not allow me to do this. They would allow me to hang PARs or Lekos off the house beams, as they have in the past. However, I knew this would not work because I would need to hang more than 40 fixtures at an angle that was too steep.
Trade Show Challenges
Throughout this entire design process, I always need to keep in mind how the rest of the booth will be affected, or if the fixtures lighting the header will spill into the neighboring booths. There is nothing worse than getting something looking great and then a lighting guy from a neighboring booth tells me to turn off a few lights pointing into their booth. So the perfect fixture for this application would be a large format white (5250 Kelvin or brighter) floodlight. If possible, LED technology would be preferred, due to the number of these fixtures that would be needed and the power needed to run them.
Bahnick’s team found a brand new fixture from Louvers International (louversintl.com), the TitanHB160 48” and 36” Titan High Bay 160W LED. These were primarily designed for the purpose of lighting a warehouse. They have never been used in our industry before, and definitely have never been used to light a 300-foot-long scenic element. After a quick demo at Catalyst Exhibits, I determined that we would need a barn door at the bottom of the fixture to keep the intense glare to a minimum. Trust me, you cannot look into these lights directly without going temporarily blind. Problem solved, and we were off and running. The next day John ordered 55 four-foot units and a pair of three-foot black fixtures to be built and delivered ASAP.
Due to the short time frame we had, and the uncertainty of this new fixture holding up to our expectations, we chose to only light the back of the header with the TitanHB160. We lit the front similar to the way I had done it the year before. In order to achieve a perfectly flat field of bright white light, I used 60 Vari*Lite VL3500 wash fixtures with a cut of Lee 251 diffusion gel custom fitted to the front of each fixture. This was done in the shop, and the lights were mounted in pre-rigged HUD truss. The gear simply rolled onto the show floor, and all we had to do was attach the motors and flip the wheels to the top of the truss. This is a very common way of doing things in the rock n’ roll touring world, and it will hopefully catch on more in the trade show industry.
Siemens is also unique in that they never do the same booth design twice. Over the years, it has been my pleasure to design from scratch every time. This is great for me as a designer – the potential for new ideas and creativity is endless, and I never get bored. However, the progression and approach in my designs have changed over the years. The changes come from the Siemens booth designs being different and also in part because of new technology. Originally, the header was all video, and I was told to keep my lights off. Then they went with a thin fabric header that I was able to light with 750W ETC Source Fours with custom dichroic color correction filters. The next year they asked for more punch and a brighter white color temperature, so I used Vari*Lite VL1000 arc fixtures. Those fixtures worked like Source Fours on steroids and provided a smooth field of light. It also allowed me to program and focus without the added cost of union labor.
The past two years, the Siemens header has exploded into a 300-by-24-foot monster, and I moved up to the Vari*Lite VL3500 Wash for output and color temperature. Due to the immense size of the header, I needed a fixture with massive, smooth coverage. I also used the Martin Viper Performance with the flat field reflector for other elements in the booth that require shutters. The machines, reception areas and vignettes are all lit with automated LED fixtures. I no longer have any conventional lights in the majority of my trade show designs today. The client’s cost for labor has gone down, and I am able to move that money into the overall lighting budget.
Every show, every year is a new challenge, with its own fresh adrenalin rush. Ted Nugent does not rappel down onto a Siemens MRI machine (yet), and I don’t get to call house lights at a trade show, but over the years, we have done some amazing tricks and gags that keep my job exciting. Plus, I get to work with the same core team frequently. I must give credit to crew chief Ryan Bereneisen for managing the more than 1,600 linear feet of truss, 100-plus motors as well as the miles of cable running from more than 500 fixtures to four massive floating dimmer pods. This is a complete team effort, and I am blessed to work with the very best in our industry.
Mike Mahoney is a freelance LD. You can get in touch with him though his website at www.mahoneydesign.biz
