The Dally M Awards, the official annual player awards for the National Rugby League competition, were held this year at Star City’s Event Centre. Mandylights were in charge of production management, production design, lighting design and staging for this prestigious event that goes live to air.
This year’s scenic design featured 140 custom made acrylic ‘blades’ that were internally illuminated and arced around the room, with automated panels rising and lowering across the stage on a Kinesys system. All scenic was entirely designed, fabricated and programmed in house by Mandylights.
For lighting onstage, Richard Neville of Mandylights decided to use the venue’s new Clay Paky Sharpy Wash 330 PCs which are essentially a Sharpy Wash fitted with a Fresnel lens. The Sharpy Wash PC, with plano-convex lens, was created for those who want a uniform wash light, but at the same time prefer a more penetrating light with more pronounced edges. From the effects point of view, the Sharpy Wash PC is identical to the standard version however, with the PC lens, the zoom only varies from 7° to 43°. This is a slightly narrower range, but with a higher light output, especially at wide angles.
“They really impressed me as they go a lot tighter than the standard Sharpy Wash yet also go incredibly wide,” commented Richard. “It’s kind of the best of both worlds between the Sharpy and the Sharpy Wash.”
Although the ‘blades’ were internally lit – with help from MA NPU’s – Richard wanted to project gobos onto them, as well as the room, and so he chose Clay Paky Alpha Profile 1500 fixtures.
“The Alpha Profile 1500’s are great as they have a really good set of gobos and a good mix of nice break-ups but also more hard-edged stuff,” he said. “They also go incredibly wide at the zoom so with sixteen of them we were able to light the 140 panels stretched over 270 degrees of the room.”
For the main wash fixture Richard chose the Martin MAC Quantum Wash, a fixture he particularly favours.
“They have a ridiculous amount of output and I really like that the face of the fixture is so big giving a great chunky beam of light,” he said. “We had diffusion filters fitted to the front of them to soften them up a bit for television.”
The venue has ninety Martin MAC101 fixtures in its roof which Richard described as great for pin spotting tables adding they deliver great colour and are really fast.
“It’s really a no-brainer to add them into the show as they’re such a great little light,” he remarked. “We also used some Martin MACIII’s for keylight as they have good colour temperature control and framing.
“For follow spots, we used the venue’s Robert Juliat fixtures which are always flawless and control was, of course, MA Lighting MA2!”
