World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) was able to pump up the excitement surrounding its annual extravaganza, WrestleMania XXIV with lighting effects, custom graphics and a huge fireworks display by bringing the event outside for the first time. Not everything played out as planned but WWE still gave wrestling fans a night they’d never forget and broke the Citrus Bowl’s gate record by squeezing 74,639 people into almost every available seat. The event generated $5.85 million in ticket revenues, a record for both WWE and the Citrus Bowl. The four-hour event was also broadcast to 65 countries around the world, live on Pay-Per-View.
The Citrus Bowl was announced as the WrestleMania XXIV destination at the close of the previous year’s event, giving the design team 12 months to get ready to rumble — and to figure out how to stage this huge event in an outdoor venue for the first time ever.
“It’s our biggest show of the year,” says WWE production designer Jason Robinson. “It’s a pinnacle event.”
WrestleMania XXIV was Robinson’s 12th, and drama and tension are key to any WWE event design.
“We wanted to create an event, a spectacle,” Robinson explains. “A platform that our wrestlers could give a fantastic show to.”
But staging such a large-scale event in an older football stadium proved to be a real challenge: there was no rigging to speak of, and being outdoors meant constant exposure to the elements — both for the equipment and the talent.
The rest of the year, WWE broadcasts every Monday and Tuesday in a hockey stadium with a 50-foot ceiling — a controlled environment that easily contains the action-packed drama of professional wrestling. The trick was translating the show to an outdoor stadium and retaining the same look and feel while also taking advantage of the sunny Florida atmosphere.
“The producers want our show to look like our show,” says Robinson. “And we wanted the wrestlers to look good, look tan, look fit. I thought it was very special because it was outside. Outdoor events hold their own charm.”
“Football stadiums are not designed to just put lights everywhere,” says WWE Lighting Director Jeff Wilkin. While he’s designed shows for various stadiums, this was his first truly outdoor venue.
“Most of the other ones have either been enclosed totally or ones with the retractable roofs, which is still essentially an enclosed stadium,” he explains. But the Citrus Bowl had no overhead steel to rig to.
“We spent two or three trips just wandering around in this stadium, looking for places to put lights,” he remembers.
The team went through three major iterations of the video and lighting design — using SketchUp Pro, AutoCAD and Compulite Vector PC Offline Editor — before arriving at the final plan to light the wrestling ring, highlight the scenic elements in the entryway, light the audience and “make it look big and brilliant,” says Wilkin. “Just make it as big and glitzy and glamorous as we can.”
But there was still the rigging problem. Robinson says they went through at least four different structure plans before finalizing a design that everyone agreed could be built.
“It was several weeks of, ‘Will this work?’” Robinson remembers.
Robinson commissioned two custom-built roofs from StageCo — one for the lighting system over the wrestling ring, and one to cover the entranceway through which the wrestlers would make their appearances. The rigging problem had been solved. Or had it?
The StageCo roof didn’t provide all the rigging necessary to fully support the grand spectacle that is WrestleMania. It’s not just the ring and the wrestlers’ entranceway that needs to be lit, but the audience as well.
“Our fans are part of it,” Robinson explains. “We want to see the signs, the booing. We take care that our fans are seen and are part of the show.”
The wrestlers feed off the energy and reactions of the audience. They need their fans. “They know that somebody really hates them or really likes them,” Robinson says. “It helps them be more involved.”
While the central StageCo structure offered lighting positions over the ring, “the rest of the building was just concrete bleachers everywhere,” Wilkin says. It was time to get creative.
“We had to go in and say, we’re going to kill this section of seating and actually set moving lights on the floor, which is different than what we normally do,” says Wilkin. Instead of hanging lights on overhead trusses, lights were mounted on handrails.
“It makes you think more about sight lines, because obviously you can’t come in and put a bunch of lights on a handrail that people are sitting right behind,” Wilkin says.
The two-week load-in for WrestleMania XXIV began with a one-week steel build for the roofs from StageCo. Bright and early the following Monday morning, the crew started putting lights, staging elements and video and sound equipment into place using one-ton chain motors.
The WrestleMania XXIV kit list included 140 Martin MAC 2000 Wash fixtures, 80 Martin MAC 600s, 74 Martin Atomic 3K Strobes, two Martin MAC 2000 Profiles, 80 Martin MAC 300s, 30 Vari*Lite 3500 Wash fixtures, 24 Vari*Lite VL5 Tungstens, 12 Coemar Infinity Wash fixtures, 92 Pixel Range PixelLine 1044s, and 92 four-foot Color Kinetics iColors. There were also 150 PAR 64s, 44 PAR 64 6-lamp bars, 12 5K Fresnels, and two ETC Source Four 10 degree fixtures.
ETC dimmers — chosen for their “reliability and ability to maintain the last look” after a signal loss — included four 96-way dimmers, four 72-way dimmers, and two 48-way dimmers alongside two Strand CD80 6x6K dimmers. The lighting control system consisted of three Compulite Vector Reds and an MA Lighting grandMA for the video, with Compulite Vector Blues as redundant back-up.
Custom graphic elements helped enhance the entrances of the wrestling superstars and to add to the overall look and feel of WrestleMania.
“WrestleMania is the biggest event of the year,” says television graphic designer Dan Cerasale. “Our goal was to make you feel this visually.”
Cerasale traveled to the site with a 2-terabyte hard drive of content, but says he created most of the WrestleMania graphic elements on-site. He produced original 3D elements in Maya and composited and manipulated these and other elements in Apple Shake, Motion, LiveType, Adobe Illustrator, and Adobe Photoshop.
“At one point a particular talent required a more hand-drawn feel or look,” explains Cerasale. “I actually drew his look free-hand on paper, took a picture with my digital camera, manipulated it in Photoshop, and ten minutes later it was up on screen.”
Many of the wrestlers — both the crowd favorites and the wrestlers everybody loves to hate — have specific lighting cues. Fans pick up on these and really get into the act.
“The Undertaker — when he comes out, we turn all the lights to purple, and there’s lightning and stuff,” Wilkin explains. “It sets an eerie mood. And fans know he’s coming out.”
It’s the anticipation that makes WrestleMania such a great event, and Wilkin says the same lighting cues at a rock concert wouldn’t have nearly the same impact. “Yeah, okay, that’s a really cool effect, but you have no idea what song’s coming up. A lot of our guys have real specific lighting cues, and as soon as that happens, you know what’s about to happen next.”
Cerasale’s graphics helped complete the mood and further emphasized the stark contrast between cues for harder hitting talent and a softer feel for a wrestling diva.
“It’s a big spectacle, big fanfare, lots of pageantry,” Wilkin says. “I can’t imagine an event would be that good just under white light.”
Each WrestleMania event ties its theme to the host city. For the Citrus Bowl in Orlando, Fla., “Fun in the Sun” was the order of the day. The wrestlers’ entrance way was designed with a South Beach hotel art deco theme, and two hundred palm trees were brought in — including twenty 45-foot palms that were lit to keep the sunshiny feel of the venue as day faded into night.
And speaking of Florida sunshine, the WWE may prefer a controlled environment for its events, but there was one factor posed by the outdoor venue that was completely outside anyone’s control: the weather.
“Weather was a big problem,” Robinson says. “We can’t cancel the event.”
With the four-hour pay-per-view event being sold in 65 countries around the world, the show had to go on, rain or shine. Inclement weather would have meant problems not just in the ring and getting to and from the dressing rooms — but would spell big trouble for the equipment.
This is where the StageCo structures pulled double-duty — not just as rigging, but also as protection from the elements.
“A lot of the planning was about the equipment and how we’d get it under structures,” Wilkin says. “How we’d get the equipment in there and get it protected.”
When the fateful day arrived, the team got very lucky. There were a couple of rain sprinkles, but that was it.
“That all our hardware was outside for five days in Florida and never got wet was a small miracle,” says Cerasale.
Then there was the fact that this older football stadium simply didn’t offer the dressing room space required by the talent.
“There were no facilities for a major TV show,” Robinson says. So production manager Brian Petree laid out the baseball stadium next-door as a small tented city with dressing rooms, catering space, walkways, showers and bathrooms.
All the work behind the scenes — from custom rigging to tent cities — paid off in a grand spectacle that outsold even the Rolling Stones in the same venue and garnered $23.8 million in pay-per-view revenue.
“The sheer scale and design of the set, combined with the graphical elements and programming, not only enhanced the talents’ characters but the character of the ‘big feel’ of WrestleMania in general,” Cerasale says.
Coupled with a huge fireworks display, WrestleMania XXIV gave wrestling fans what they expected from the WWE, and more.
“We geared it toward what you’d see at the Olympics,” Robinson says. “The ultimate goal was to create a very fun atmosphere. You felt like you were part of the action. You felt it with the music, saw it with the pyrotechnics. You wanted to be there, watching wrestling.”
