Is there any pressure when you sign on to design the Halftime show at the Super Bowl? You are working on one of the highest-viewed televised sporting events in the U.S.; you want something that no one has ever seen before; you are working with the biggest names in music; and it all happens live in a 12-minute performance. Oh, and you have only eight-minutes to set it all up in front of 100,000 people. But the team for this year's Bridgestone Super Bowl XLIV Halftime Show at the Sun Life Stadium in Miami Gardens, Fla. took it to a new level with a design fraught with risk and spectacularly rewarded. Production designer Bruce Rodgers, lighting designer Al Gurdon and screens/graphics producer Lee Lodge collaborated on the NFL Network Production with executive producer Ricky Kirshner and director Hamish Hamilton.
"Hamish, Ricky and I met and discussed the feelings that we wanted to grab," says Rodgers. "We discussed not using a surrounding audience; we wanted the set design to feel epic; we wanted to do a large-scale video thing; we wanted a design that felt like the band was performing for the stadium and not just the TV audience." Rodgers started playing around with ideas and searching for visual references. "I came up with this idea-we have Hamish, Al Gurdon, Lee Lodge and The Who; all these Brits! We are also on the world's largest American stage. So let's put them on Captain America's shield. Then I thought, ‘well then, let's make Captain America's shield all out of video.' I sent an e-mail to the team and everyone got very excited. We wanted to do something epic and risky because no one really cares unless it's bigger than before."
The Shield Stage
The shield was made up of 26 radials that surrounded a main stage, which was made of 14 pieces. Each of the 26 outer carts were dubbed "Whale Tails" because the outer edge of the stage retracted up for transport but lowered in place, sloping to the ground. Twelve of the carts contained smoke machines for atmosphere and eight carts carried full-color lasers. Rodgers turned to Brian Sullivan of B+R Scenery out of Camarillo, Calif. for the stage construction. This was the 17th Super Bowl Halftime set for B+R. The center stage was built in California and the rest was fabricated and shipped in sections. "Everything else was trucked to Miami and built like an erector set on-site," comments Rodgers. "Brian built all the elements for the 26 radial carts but shipped them in bulk. It was such a well-thought out plan; it was like an assembly line of carpenters, video crew, pyro, lasers, lighting and cabling."
During the critical eight minutes, the Super Bowl needed to get everything in place for the halftime show, including assembling the 40 carts that made up the stage. Staging supervisors Cap Spence and Tony Hauser, both longtime veterans of Super Bowl halftime shows, headed up the staging crew. They oversaw a crew of 600 volunteers who physically had to push the carts onto the field without hitting the goal posts or making divots in the field.
3,055 MiStrips
For the video shield, Rodgers turned to XL Video to help engineer and supply the five-foot long LED Barco MiStrips, the processing and technical support during the installation and the show. "I wanted a technology that would be nice, bright and controllable as well as weatherproof. Also, I knew Hamish liked the vibe of the MiStrips in previous shows he had done," explains Rodgers. "I designed the MiStrips radiating from the outside going towards the middle on nine-inch centers. I worked closely with the XL team from the very beginning. I know Ken Gay at the XL LED Lab in Nashville and Marcel De Keyzer at the XL Lab in New York, so I approached them with my ideas. The first design that we came up with needed 7,000 MiStrips." Gay had to explain to Rodgers that after a survey, they found that there were only 7,000 MiStrips in existence worldwide and he might want to cut his design back somewhat. The final design consisted of 3,055 MiStrips.
One big issue was that the MiStrips video processors had to stay hot during transport onto the field so settings weren't lost. XL came up with the idea to have the processors powered by onboard UPS units. There were power drops in the compound where the carts were stored as well as in the staging area to keep the batteries in the UPS units fully charged. Once the stage came together, the XL crew made 109 connections in less than eight minutes. Rodgers was impressed with XL team. "I needed an immense amount of equipment, but I also needed a completely reliable company. They have the technology and we knew that they could make it happen. And they certainly did. During Halftime all the technical guys from XL Video were like Navy Seals or ninjas. It was awesome."
The Who's "Visual Vocabulary"
Lighting designer Al Gurdon took some of his inspiration from the band. "The Who is an iconic rock band known partly for a very distinctive and recognizable visual style. There is a pre-existing visual ‘vocabulary,' which can inform and support the design approach." Gurdon started connecting that to the shape of the stage. "That circular shape of the stage lent itself, for example, to the RAF roundel, something that people identify with The Who," he says. "From that, the lighting developed. If you start with a circular shape, it tends to push you into circular kind of design. Also, from the scale of the stadium, I would say that it pushes towards using fixtures that will be powerful enough to work on that scale and on television. We wanted to deliver an impact, a spectacle. I used a lot of Vari*Lite VL3500s, which I think work very well on that sort of scale. The Falcons are also a large part of a stadium rig like that; something of that kind of intensity."
Since the stage was essentially flat with no background, Gurdon knew the lighting needed to create dimension. "One of the challenges was to develop the visual impact of the shield, the stage itself, and extend that out into the audience in a three-dimensional way," explains Gurdon. "I worked to get light and color into the vertical aspects of the arena as well so there was a background to close-ups and so that you felt the sense that the audience and the stadium itself were all part of the spectacle and the set."
He also used a lot of ChromaQ LED Color Blocks around the different levels of the stadium. "We pixel-mapped those at times; sometimes we ran them as lights and sometimes we ran them as pixel-mapped video so we could extend images through the shield and out up into the stadium," describes Gurdon. This helped to create a three-dimensional environment – a more complete environment than just looking at a stage.
Monolithic Tones
One of the things that sets apart Gurdon's design for the halftime show is his use of bold, rich colors along with haze and smoke to create solid beams of color behind the band. "Color gives a sense of identity for particular sections of the music," says Gurdon. "We are very careful to give it a very monolithic tone, which gives each section of music a sort of strong visual identity through the lighting, as well as combining integrated video and any other element like lasers and so on. We aimed for high, strong statements."
Gurdon's lighting programmer for the event was industry veteran Michael "Oz" Owen. Owen coordinated with video content programmer Jason Rudolph to ensure that the lighting and the LEDs in the stage floor were completely synchronized. Owen and Rudolph both used PRG's Virtuoso control consoles. "I always prefer using a Virtuoso," Owen says. "In Miami, I had three; one in the band/stage rehearsal tent, one in the design cabin and one front of house." Rudolph adds, "I used the Virtuoso because it made it so easy for Oz and I to sync our cue lists. He could export his cue timings, and I could import them directly into my show and edit them as needed." PRG engineered a HTP (Highest Takes Precedence) data merger for the lighting and the video systems. "The merger was there so that we could control the Color Blocks either via the media server doing pixel-mapping, or from Oz's Virtuoso console," explains Rudolph. "It gave us more programming options." All of the control was connected with a full fiber optic data network with PRG Virtuoso Nodes and PRG Series 400 Ethernet Switches.
Five Days of Pre-Viz in London
Due to the severely limited rehearsal time on-site, Gurdon and Owen spent five days at PRG/Essential Lighting's pre-visualization studio in London, programming the show. "We did pre-viz using WYSIWYG," explains Gurdon. "One of the big limitations of the job is that you can't have the stage on the field much. You have to do a lot of planning in advance to make sure things work. We had the stage on the field one evening, and then again a week later with the band when we did four run-throughs of the 12 minutes, and that was it."
Production Resource Group (PRG) provided the lighting package with all control and power distribution as well as crew, some of whom were working on their tenth Halftime shows. "I work with PRG all the time," comments Gurdon. "I can rely on them to put everything together and making it work. They are also flexible enough to be able to adapt to production requirements, and I always know they will deliver. I couldn't ask for more from them."
Rich Gorrod, who has worked with Gurdon on a number of projects, served as lighting director and gaffer. Bob Barnhart and Dave Grill from Full Flood were lighting directors. In addition to Owen, programmer Pete Radice handled setting up the desks and checking over the system during fire up and maintenance. Full Flood Inc. coordinated with PRG on equipment and crew.
Lasers and Pyro
Lasers added an additional dimension to the overall design and further evoked the "visual vocabulary" that Gurdon referred to earlier. The laser work was designed and provided by Laser Design Productions out of Markham, Ontario and led by president and designer Doug Adams. He coordinated with laser technical director Victor Tomei and programmer Jason McEachern. Adams design included 400W of power produced through 16 laser sources that were located on the field and within the stage. Fourteen Pangolin laser control cards were all networked at a central control position under the stage. Eight full-color lasers were positioned in eight of the shield carts, and eight additional lasers, including four 50-watt YAGs and four full-color lasers, were located upstage behind the player's bench. The pyrotechnics were designed by Ron Smith and provided by Rialto, Calif.-based Pyro Spectaculars by Souza.
Field-Sized Imagery
When you have a stage that is made of video, you need media content. This is where screens/graphics producer Lee Lodge comes in. "The main thing was how to choreograph dynamic looks over 12 minutes that really captured the architectural form of the circle," says Lodge. One of the first things Lodge had to think about was the resolution of the imagery on the shield. "This wasn't just a TV that we could switch on and could see very clear pictures," he comments. "From there, we went to the two prerequisites of color and shape. That's really where the beauty of working with Al Gurdon and his team comes in; that's when we can really start choreographing the color progressions, and then once we have those blocks in place, then it's really thinking about movement."
Lodge describes the progression. "We know that the first thing that we wanted to do with ‘Pinball Wizard' was to create a sense of mystery; you would really have no idea what was happening or what the surface was. We wanted it to be a Close Encounters feeling – when you can see something in front of you, but you still can't orientate to what it is. On the first big chord, that's when we would get the first dynamic event of LED and establish the signature ripple of the shield. When we progressed onto ‘Baba O'Riley,' we then wanted to go to a far more digital feel. ‘Baba' also worked very strongly as framework to the lasers." For "Baba," Adams designed a classic green laser look that echoed past Who performances. Leading into the closing of "Baba," full color lasers were showcased as they transitioned into colors of purple, red, white, blue and even an amber/brown look choreographed in sequence with the lighting.
"For ‘Who Are You,' we wanted to go with a retro feel, something signifying the more iconic Who looks from classics 1960s England. That's where the RAF symbol came from and also the use of arrows," explains Lodge. "We felt that we could take that creative kind of step and have something far more literal on the screen; not video, not real, but iconic and 2D, that would really work well."
{mosimage}For playback, Rudolph used two Green Hippo HD Hippotizers, also controlled from a PRG Virtuoso console. "I work with Jason a lot on a variety of different projects," says Lodge. "Jason is just a constant; there is no real dividing line between the technical and the creative; they are both the same hand. The design studio that we used to create the content was Loyalkaspar out of New York City. I had a great design team at Loyalkaspar." Lodge did pre-visualization using the UVA d3 system provided by XL Video. "I often like using d3 as a communication tool," pointed out Lodge. "It is good for the director to see his camera and it is good tool to communicate a project to a client. Because we had very limited time on site we obviously did a lot of pre-visualization; it was crucial to this project."
At the end of halftime, the entire team knew they had accomplished pulling off the riskiest 12 minutes in live television, presenting Super Bowl fans an unprecedented experience both in the stadium and at home. Even the Brits felt like Captain America, notes Rodgers. "You push the envelope. As an artist, that's what you want to do. I knew that with everybody involved it was achievable. It was a real example of our industry at its best; needing everybody to work together to make something big happen. All the planning, designing and meticulous attention to detail really paid off."
Super Bowl XLIV Credits and Vendor List
Executive Producer: Ricky Kirshner
Director: Hamish Hamilton
Executive in Charge of Production: Rob Paine
Production Designer: Bruce Rodgers
Lighting Designer: Al Gurdon
Screens/Graphics Producer: Lee Lodge
Pre-Game, Pro-Bowl & Tailgate Director: Gregg Gelfand
Production Staff
Associate Producer: Arianne Shean Wert
Pre-Game, Pro-Bowl & Tailgate Associate Producer: Lisa Geers
Art Directors: Sean Dougall, Mai Sakai
Assistant Art Director: Jake Kavanagh
Production Supervisor: Augie Max Vargas, Brad Duns
Production Managers: Cara Imperato,
Amanda McDonough, Shelby Sundling
Production Coordinators: Dan Caldwell, Ali Craig, Rosanna Del Buono, Jen Dunn, Jim
Stechschulte
Lighting
Lighting Directors: Rich Gorrod, Bob Barnhart, Dave Grille
Lighting Programmers: Michael "Oz" Owen, Peter Radice
Video Content Programmer: Jason Rudolph
Gaffers: Paul Bell, Jr., Richard Beck, Jr., Brian McKinnon, Gregory Smith
Electrician: Jose David Serralles
PRG Project Manager: Robb Minnotte
PRG Lead Technician: Matt Geneczko
PRG Technician: Zach Cromwell
Falcon Technicians: Norman Elwell, Tim
Obermann
Arc Light Technician: Ronald Stellpflue
Rigging & Staging
Staging Supervisors: Tony Hauser, Cap Spence
Rigging Coordinator: Steve Thomas
Head Rigger: Joel Magarian
Rigging Supervisors: David Hernandez,
Stephen Woodward
Staging Coordinators: Doug Cook, Aaron Chawla, Thomas Iannacco, Glenn Ingram, Graeme Langden, Marcus Lopez, George McPherson, Hans Wert
Set Carpenters: Roger Cabot, Chris Collins, Robert Leisten, Julio Rocha
XL Video
Project Manager: Robert Magee
XL LED Lab, Nashville: Ken Gay
Technical Manager: Michael Spencer
Lead Technician: Luke Pilato
LED Technicians: Trace Deroy, Doug Eldredge, David Imlau, Fernando Llamas, Curtis Luxton, Will Nazarowski, Steve Otten, Eric Petty, Rod Silhanek
Loyalkaspar
Animation Director: Elliot Chaffer
Animation Executive Producer: David
Herbruck
Animation Producer: Scott Lasko
Animation Technical Director: Dennis Cheung
Animator / Designer: Charlie Wan
Animation Production Coordinator: Steve Renn
Lasers
Laser Designer: Doug Adams
Laser Technical Director: Vittorio Tomei
Laser Programmer: Jason Douglas McEachern
Laser Technicians: Jason Bridges, Keith
Hellebrand, Robert Pratl, Kenneth Schmitt, Noam Sigal, Chris Stuart
Account Representative: Jim Schorer
Pyrotechnics
Pyrotechnics Designer: Ron Smith
Pyrotechnics Technicians: Aaron Beargon, Paul Bruggema, Charles Cauthen, George Cruzen, Carter Hilman, James Lewis, Kirby Nelis, Steve Souza, Sherry Souza, Paul Souza, Chris Souza, Rebecca Timohovich, Dimitri Timohovich, Chad Whitlock, Bryan Whittaker, Greg Young
LED Equipment: XL Video
Lighting Equipment: Production
Resource Group, VER, Arc Light, A&O
Technology, Attitude Specialty Lighting
Laser Equipment: Laser Design
Productions
Pyrotechnics Equipment: Pyro
Spectaculars by Souza
Set Construction: B+R Scenery, Mecca Productions Inc., National Flag & Banner
Rigging Equipment: Stage Rigging, Inc.
