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Ayrton MagicDot-R for NFL Sunday Night Football Open

Lighting designer Benoit Richard, of Millennium Lighting Design, Inc, chose his first use of Ayrton MagicDot-R fixtures for the video shoot of NBC’s NFL Sunday Night Football Open, employing 60 units in his design.

The Sunday Night Football opening sequence is the official introduction to America’s prime time Sunday night programme and features Carrie Underwood for the third year running. Filmed in June on Stage 23 at Warner Brothers, Burbank, the Open was first broadcast nationwide on 13 September 2015, with weekly updates tailored to feature each Sunday’s rival teams.

This year marked a style change - described as Nashville meets Hollywood - with the creation of a large virtual video backdrop and a new arrangement of the theme tune, ‘Waiting All Day for Sunday Night’, which Underwood performs in front of a live audience, amid real and projected appearances by top NFL players.

Underwood’s performance takes place on a high-gloss, diamond-shaped stage against a black backdrop, which became a large video screen for visual effects. Director of photography, Chuck Ozeas, deferred the design of the concert lighting to Benoit Richard.

Richard created a dynamic floor package which incorporated 60 Ayrton MagicDot-R fixtures. Thirty free-standing MagicDot-R units were installed just below stage level on a recessed drop-shelf which lined the two downstage edges of the diamond stage. Richard used them to project through the audience and bounce light off the front edge of the shiny stage surface.

Thirty more MagicDot-R fixtures were rigged around the diamond stage’s upstage edges, ‘yoked out’ on 1.5 ft vertical truss pipes which lifted them clear of the floor and orientated them straight out towards the audience. This enabled Richard to maximize the effect of the shiny stage surface without interfering with the black backdrop.

“I used the pan to create a continuous moving fan effect behind Carrie, making full use of the colour palette as well as the movement,” Richard explains. “On camera, the reflections in the stage surface gave the effect of a double row of MagicDots behind her as they moved in slinky curves, doubling the impact.” The Ayrton MagicDot-R fixtures were supplied for NFL’s SNF Open shoot by VER and are distributed in the US exclusively by Morpheus Lights.

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