While So-Fi Stadium, the sports and entertainment complex in Inglewood, CA, played host to the 2022 Super Bowl LVI and the Pepsi Halftime Show, there were also number of parties, events, and Super Bowl celebrations both in and outside the stadium. Here’s a look at two companies’ work supporting these activations with equipment, technical personnel, and expert solutions.
4Wall Supports Super Bowl Celebration
On Location Performance Stage
Prior to the game, 4Wall provided Kreate/On Location with a large truss structure for a concert stage outside of SoFi Stadium for the Super Bowl. Performances on the stage included The Black Crowes and Wyclef Jean. The TD was Shawn Richardson; Roof Lead was Rick Prather; and 4Wall account manager was Nathan Jones. The lighting and video equipment on the On Location stage were provided by LMG.
Super Bowl Rams’ After-Party
After the Los Angeles Rams won Super Bowl LVI, they threw a massive after-party at the Jet Center LA to celebrate their victory over the Cincinnati Bengals. 4Wall was brought in by The Arzt Group, w5 Creative, ShowBox, and Trofatter Productions to provide all of the lighting and rigging for the Rams after party. They went from initial plans to party to strike in less than two weeks for this celebration!
The lighting design for this event was handled by Tyler Trofatter of Trofatter Productions. Rigging support was provided by C2W Rigging. The 4Wall account manager was Bob Suchocki and project manager was David George. The lighting crew chief was Matthew Weede, whose lighting tech team included Justin Grotteland, Richard Jackson, Mike Tarango, Sally Shepard, and George Khamo. Learn more about 4Wall at www.4wall.com
PRG Brought Super Bowl Sized Solutions
Pre-Game Lighting and Rigging
Once again, the team from Production Club, a multidisciplinary creative studio specialized in designing and producing immersive experiences, designed the custom light show and displays featured in NBC Sports coverage prior to Super Bowl LVI. PRG provided lighting and rigging for those moments by way of technical producer Tim Fallon.
PRG sent six lighting technicians, a rigger, a fiber networking engineer, and an on-site project manager. The lighting equipment included six MA Lighting grandMA2 consoles distributed on site and more than 300 fixtures, with the entire system integrated with SoFi’s internal single mode fiber network.
Twenty-two Solaris Flares and 44 Martin Rush PAR 2s surrounded Zedd for his pre-game DJ set in the end zone. Lighting Designer Griffin Behm lined the tunnels of the SoFi Stadium with pipe, drape, and hundreds of GLP Impression X4 Atoms and Arris SkyPanels, which created a paparazzi effect as players exited their locker rooms. As they entered the field, 16 Arrimax Cinema lights on Roadrunner stands went off.
Halftime Cinematic Cameras, Engineering, and Remote Control Room
Music’s most-viewed stage hosted a West Coast heavy lineup of hip hop legends and PRG was there to elevate and capture the action with a proprietary camera workflow, engineering, and lighting solutions. Last year, Director Hamish Hamilton and show producers Jesse Collins and Aaron Cooke, worked with PRG to put cinematic cameras on the halftime show for the first time ever. After achieving such a stunning visual result they had to bring it back, and PRG once again delivered with its proprietary 35LIVE!® multicamera system.
The 35LIVE! workflow replaces a traditional multi-camera approach using 35mm cinema cameras and film lenses, powered by a broadcast engineering and fiber system. For the Halftime Show’s live production, PRG built a control room inside the NFL media center, purpose-built for the Halftime Show feed. The control room featured a large Evertz router system, along with an AJA Kumo router and FS-HDRs that allowed live color-grading to all 24 of the cameras.
“We used one of our larger flypacks for this event” explains PRG’s Technical Project Manager Brian Barnett. “The Brute system includes an Evertz EQX-16 288 x 862 router, EMR audio router and VIP-X multiviewers, along with Cobalt UDX & DA’s. Additionally, we had 26 AJA FS-HDRs to provide camera format conversation and apply LUTs for live color grading, which is something you don’t often see in this application.”
The camera order included two camera engineers, 13 Sony Venice cameras, an assortment of Fujinon and Canon lenses, and the 35LIVE! lens control and ancillary accessories. DP Dylan Sanford worked closely with Hamilton, Lead Video Operator John Hurley, and DITs Matt Conrad and Terrance Ho to dial in the best look incorporating a live color grade.
One of the rarer pieces of equipment on the field was a 35-700MM Fuji lens. This one of a kind, super-long 35mm box lens is outfitted with a PL mount and a F2.8 T-stop range (35-315mm) to F4.8 (to 700mm). It fills a very specific need with its longer focal length, allowing the capture of farther distances without sacrificing stop loss when adapting to a B4 box lenses.
Producer Cooke was a strong proponent in last year’s leap to the cinema platform. Working with Hamilton, they really pushed for this camera type and look. James Coker, Lead Camera Supervisor, designed a camera workflow that allowed each Venice set-up to tie in seamlessly with the control room.
PRG’s Morgan Kellum oversaw the camera and control room side working closely with Technical Producer Tim Kubit and Tech Supervisor Chris Sullivan. Kubit and Sullivan had the huge task of connecting the cinema cameras, NBC Broadcast cameras, and other various feeds into several control rooms utilizing six Ereca Stage Racer 2 systems and a plethora of multi-channel Tac Fiber provided by PRG. PRG’s Matt Puthoff managed the Broadcast implementation led by Lead Engineer Warren Chong and Engineer Joe Dalecki who alongside Barnett, were instrumental in handling all ends of the control room. They were supported by PRG’s lead engineer Johnny Bagtatlyan and his team of engineers: Sam Sanchez, Izzy Zuniga, Bobby Arias, Kelly Nixon, Dave West, and Mark Belhumeur.
Halftime Show Lighting
PRG has been supporting Super Bowl Halftime Shows for 22 years and was back providing lighting for the design by Al Gurdon, with programming by Eric Marchwinski and Mark Humphrey, and gaffers Alen Sisul and Jason Uchita. It was a massive amount of gear, including cables, networking, power, infrastructure and more than 600 lighting fixtures, among them four proprietary PRG GroundControl™ Long Throw Followspots, all controlled by four MA Lighting grandMA2s and a grandMA2 lite.
The Halftime Show is famously loaded-in in approximately seven minutes, making it one of the most high-pressure moments in television. With the world watching, there is no room for error. PRG Series 400® was used to rapidly connect power to the field carts, ensuring that everything went off according to schedule. The rolling carts housed eight full racks and eight half racks for a total of 144 break out boxes, with the overall system including more than 30 PRG Super Nodes. Learn more about all the solutions that PRG offers at www.prg.com/en/about/latest-news/super-bowl-lvi
