A quiet revolution has been taking place behind the scenes on Broadway. An increasing number of lighting designers are choosing ETC's Eos desk to control huge rigs of conventional, LED and moving lights for the largest shows. Currently, Eos-family desks run the lights on more than three-quarters of Broadway shows.
Broadway's Bring it On is an energetic, acrobatic musical that gives a glimpse into the world of high school cheerleading. The show's high impact, high octane lighting design is also a highly ambitious endeavour. It features 29 DMX universes, more than 350 moving lights and nearly 1,000 LED fixtures, including six ETC Selador Desire Ice LED fixtures. An ETC Eos control desk is at the head of the massive lighting system.
"People are surprised that we have a show this size on Eos," says Bring it On's lighting programmer Tim Rogers. Lighting designer Jason Lyons agrees, "Every time I talk about it with people, they doubt that Eos can handle it, because they've only known Eos as a theatre desk. But it's really a moving light console. We can put everything on one desk, so programmers aren't working from different consoles. Eos gives us the ability to eliminate the two-console system, making everything tighter and cleaner." Eos also allows them to use MIDI to trigger the video server to control four video screens.
Bring it On's lighting plot includes a grid of LED fixtures covering the back- and sidewalls that is used at times to replicate stadium lighting. The show was used as a beta test for the pixel-mapping feature on Eos, and the lighting team used this feature to map the entire stage.
"Pixel mapping led us to where the show needed to go," says Lyons, "because it allowed us to think differently about how we could light. The director enjoyed it because he could suggest things and see them right away on stage. If something needed to be changed, we could push it out immediately, while instantaneously backing it up on the show file. We never had to deal with content structure, which was really helpful. Even if you're just dealing with a strip of LEDs, it's an easy way to do effects.
"If you want just a sweep of lights, you can say 'here's my block of lights' and move it left to right. Writing an explosion that starts in the centre and moves outward is easier. Before you'd need to programme it all as a chase, but now you can just set it up on pixel mapping. As this show was being built, we had a lot of questions about how the pixel mapping would work, but it all came together."
