For the third year in a row, Don Mischer Productions and White Cherry Entertainment helped electrify the Super Bowl Halftime Show by co-executive producing a live performance by Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band. The NFL had wanted Springsteen to do the show for years and he finally relented after watching Tom Petty’s performance last year in Phoenix. In an act of synchronicity, Jeff Ravitz and George Travis, Springsteen’s touring lighting designer and production manager, respectively, suggested to the Boss last summer that they bring in a set designer for his then-upcoming tour. They wanted to bounce around ideas and concepts in order for the set designer to create sketches and eventually better understand Springsteen’s production values. They called Bruce Rodgers of Tribe, Inc. and brought him in for a meeting.
“I went and hung out,” Rodgers said. “When we did the renderings, it was mentioned that we did a good job of illustrating the vibe of a Springsteen concert. A lot of the ideas were developed thanks to those sketches and the fast response of the production crew that George Travis has on his team.”
Ricky Kirshner of White Cherry Entertainment had hired Rodgers to design the Democratic National Convention over the summer. A week after the convention, Kirshner called Rodgers and asked him to be the production designer for the Super Bowl Halftime Show for the third consecutive time. Two weeks later, Rodgers was meeting with Kirshner and his partner Glenn Weiss, Don Mischer, who was also the director, Charles Coplin and Lawrence Randall of the NFL, plus George Travis and John Landau from Springsteen’s management team.
“It was so cool sitting there ready to design, knowing both camps,” Rodgers said, having worked with both Springsteen and having been production designer for the last two Super Bowl Halftime Shows. “And of the actual design that was seen five months later, 98 percent was determined by the first napkin sketch.”
In that initial meeting, the stage design was sketched out, the location of the stage was decided, and the lighting and effects were thumbnailed. The creative team developed a series of storyboards, and a few weeks later it was all presented to Springsteen. It was hugely successful and it got the green light to proceed to fabrication.
“The design was very simple,” Rodgers said, “but it was a designed simplicity. B&R Scenery did an excellent job of fabricating the set, which looked simple but was basically a high-tech puzzle that only the halftime technical and production crews can manage. At the end of the day, the design was made all the more effective and beautiful by the lighting, video, and pyrotechnics departments. The show was a success thanks to the professional marriage between the Springsteen team and the halftime team. Our art directors, Sean Dougall and Mai Sakai, were also an integral part of the Tribe Inc. design team.”
Full Flood was brought in to design the lighting. Lighting designers Bobby Dickinson and Bob Barnhart, with insight from Springsteen’s touring lighting designer, Jeff Ravitz, resulted in a show that was a careful balance between the gigantic scale of television and the minimalist visual aesthetic style of Bruce Springsteen.
“The last thing Bruce would want is a big scenic look,” said Dickinson. “He’s a very straightforward, dynamic performer with a no-nonsense approach. Unfortunately, this is visually at odds with a large TV event of this scale. You need something other than the band and the audience to define the scale of the event in the wide shots. Usually that’s accomplished by using staging theatrics and masses of choreographed people. We walked into this knowing we would not have this and we designed a rig that could support the big look without breaking the Springsteen aesthetic.” What the designers had in mind was getting some big looks from some big lights.
“From the lighting perspective,” Dickinson said, “it became apparent that there were few tools that offer as large an impact as xenon lights because the width of the beam and the amount of raw lumens available allows for gigantic shafts of light to be read on camera in an indoor venue. It brings verticality to the event that might not otherwise be there. We went ahead and designed it depending heavily on xenon lights.”
One of the factors that worked in their favor was that they had a new rigging option available for the lighting. “For the first time, we were able to put xenon lights in the sports lighting towers because of a new xenon lamp. The Alpha One Falcon 6K weighs 225 pounds instead of the 600-pound contemporaries, so we put a quantity in the towers. It made a big statement in regards to the back light on stage.” Steve Thomas, the rigging supervisor, and Joel Magirian of Stage Rigging rigged sections of truss from the field lighting towers to accommodate the lighting.
Dickinson called the new Falcon 6k as a “rocket ship of a light” and “a good long-throw instrument.” PRG, Alpha One, and Arc Lighting supplied the lighting, and B&R Scenery supplied the staging. Pyro Spectacular supplied the pyro under the license of Ron Smith.
Chaos Visual Productions supplied nine Winvision LED displays with 8mm pitch, eight of which were facing front and one facing back.
“Our crew chief, Dave Panscik, was back for a repeat performance and was able to impart valuable advice to LED techs Russell Wingfield and Jeffrey Gainer,” said CVP chief John Wiseman. “That made the five-minute deployment of this technology from cart to live TV possible. Volunteers coordinated by Cap Spence rounded out the video team. As with all the other departments, it was an amazing short five-minute transition from football field to a major concert stage event.”
In addition to the xenon lights, there were a number of Martin MAC 2000 Wash fixtures, Vari*Lite VL5As and Martin Atomic 3K Strobes mounted on the balcony rail. On the field was a conventional lighting package and Color Kinetics ColorBlast LEDs were mounted in the stage along with MR-16s. The lighting console was a PRG Virtuoso VX.
Dickinson has been lighting the Super Bowl halftime shows since they changed from “pom-poms and marching bands to celebrity shows.” His first was 1993 when Michael Jackson performed for the halftime show in the Rose Bowl. “The next year in Atlanta was the first one where they actually turned off the sports lighting and reset the cameras for theatrical lighting. It was a big deal for the NFL because if the lights didn’t come back on, then they have no game,” Dickinson said.
The creative team first met last summer into early fall. “We were trying to brainstorm on a new approach,” Dickinson said, “because traditionally with concert-based shows they were done in center of field at the 50 yard line. But last year we put the stage at one end zone and it was really received positively. It gives a better sense of size and scale of the arena.”
This year, when the design team got together, the producers felt that a Bruce Springsteen show is about his proximity to the audience and the reaction from the audience. So they decided to put the stage on the 50-yard line, but on sideline close to the stands. In addition, they decided that the stage would be only four feet high, two feet lower than any previous halftime show stage.
“What’s cool about that is that Bruce can reach out and touch people like it’s a revival,” Rodgers said. “It turned out to be a successful decision I think,” Dickinson added.
The lighting director, David Grill, is, according to Dickinson, the “guy who keeps the show together.” There were two console programmers, Matt Firestone and Pete Radice. In addition to managing the account for PRG, Tony Ward was also the head electrician.
Dickinson emphasized that the production is based on a lot of teamwork. “We all made many trips the venue to mechanically figure out how to install the lighting and not block a single seat,” he said, “because we are verboten to block sightlines. And it all has to be cabled and installed so that it is completely safe for the public. But the biggest challenge is that the field lighting needs to be installed, plugged in, calibrated, and ready to go in six minutes. It takes a tremendous amount of planning. Every part needs to be rehearsed.”
But the pride and joy of every greens keeper in professional sports is the natural grass field. And for that reason, they had to be careful not to damage the turf.
“They only let us rehearse on the grass twice,” Dickinson revealed, “once on Sunday, before the Super Bowl. We had just started the installation of lighting a few days before and we were not ready to rehearse cues. The rest of the rehearsals were for the music and it occurs in tent outside of the stadium. So we had to program all lights in the stadium by focusing on nothing but grass, while we programmed the field level lighting in the tent. It was a very schizophrenic circumstance to build cues. The next time we got to see the lights and stage on the field was in dress rehearsals (in the pouring rain). We ran the show three times and that’s it. It was really a disjointed, hair-raising process. But somehow we always manage to pull it off.”
