Theatre content from Live Design: After the drama and excitement of the 2016 Summer Olympic Games, Durham Marenghi, lighting designer for the Opening and Closing Ceremonies at Maracanã Stadium, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil looks back at the highlights and challenges during the design process and the industry itself. He has also worked on previous Olympic ceremonies in Turin, Beijing and Sochi. Live Design caught up with Marenghi while he reflected on his experience in Rio.
10 comments:
Having only had exposure to lighting design within a theatrical setting, I was intruiged to hear a little bit about the lighting for thy Olympic Games. Such a massive event, in such a massive space, offers up a huge variety of its own problems and solutions that someone coming from a purely theatrical background, such as myself, would have no idea of how to approach.
I was not disappointed. Within the first question, Marenghi disclosed that only had a third of the typical budget for those sorts of events was available. (A quick google search was unsuccessful in finding what a typical budget would be.) The conversation then changed from the more business side of things to the practical challenges faced by the lighting team, in particular the box city sequence. (Watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tk2lbtgx_v8). The problem with that sequence, as with the rest of the ceremonies, was lighting both for the 75,000 people in the stadium, but also for the millions (billions?) of people watching live broadcasts. I'd never considered the problems associated with lighting for two mediums (live and televised) at the same time, but I imagine that any show with live cam footage must face the same challenges.
I find his approach to the design very interesting in the sense that he wanted two different things for the opening and the closing. I liked that he simply did not do the same for the opening and the closing because they are two very different moments in the Olympics. I do find it interesting that early on in the process they decided to light it for television instead of the audience that would be present. There was no way they could have just seen what it would look like on TV because how drastic the difference is. For example, Shrek the Musical was filmed so that it could be viewed on TV, specifically on Netflix, and the lighting does not look anywhere near where it would on stage. It is almost very hard to watch and sit through. So I am glad they realized they would need to decide that before going in. And I think they made the right decision, since so many people would be watching the televised version. There is also the challenge of never having seen the actors before the show. I cannot imagine facing that situation because things always change so much. I was very impressed with how he approached this design and the thought process that went into it.
This seems like a really cool event that highlights a lot of really bizarre problems that are really easy to forget. First off, there’s something to be said about the sheer scale of the Olympic closing ceremony. The size of the stadium, the amount of people in it, and the amount that’s going on technically is absolutely incredible. But aside from the scale, the fact that they had to schedule out dark time in the night, because that was their only dark time, is something that though seems obvious, I doubt that anyone who watched the ceremony realized that it had to have been created at such unholy hours. Pre-vis most certainly helps, but it isn’t lighting everything in the space for real, and it almost certainly isn’t lighting everything to be filmed on camera. Which brings me to the second issue that I am fascinated by, the fact that the entire ceremony had to be under lit live to be properly lit for the camera, while is a necessary compromise, a compromise nonetheless. I’d be interested in hearing a more elaborated version of that decision making process.
This was a neat read. Marenghi did a great job explaining the entire creative process of lighting the Olympics this year. I had no idea that most of the work was done in WYSIWYG. That's pretty crazy, but also understandable, because programming a huge show like that is tough to do in such a short amount of time. That, and it could only be done at night. I would like to have known what form of script the design team got for this. Since there's constantly changing scenery and performers, I wonder if they queued everything off of the music, or if there was an actual script. The technicalities, however, aren't as interesting as the creative side that Merenghi discusses, so it's nice that he didn't focus on them. I wonder what it's like to tell the IOC and the VIPS attending the ceremonies not to worry about the dim look in the arena that is required for a good-looking TV broadcast. The end product looked great on my end, though!
I can only imagine how much pressure it must be to design an olympics ceremony. Not only will your work be publicized for the huge crowd, but it will be publicized on national television for the entire world to see. Your design work needs to encompass the relationship and sportsmanship between all countries, not to mention create an incredibly spectacle that will spark people’s interests in the games themselves. I loved the spectacle of the Rio opening and closing ceremonies, so I’m so surprised to hear that they were only assigned this project 10 months in advance, and that they only had ⅓ of the budget they usually have. Marenghi makes it sound like the symbiosis between lighting and media was as is expected for a ceremony like this, but it must have been so incredibly time consuming to figure out how to get the projections as strong as they were while still creating an interesting image with light. I personally loved how the rotating metal sculpture reflected the flame disco-ball style all over the audience and auditorium itself. I had no idea that this was done due to environmental reasons with the size of the flame. It’s very cool to read about these large- scale design projects.
I am simply fascinated by the sheer scale of arena events like these, and the logistics involved, especially for events as big and necessarily showy as the Olympic Games. It was intriguing that much of the design was done in WYSIWIG, but when I think about it, completely logical. When dealing with events of this scale, it is absolutely necessary to have pre-visualisation capabilities if only to be sure of what one is doing. Also, as he said, only being able to work during the night probably posed a significant challenge for them, making it impossible to have a real 10 out of 12. It was interesting to not that some of the actual programming came from the pre-visualization in WYSIWYG, just showing how powerful of a tool for large-scale, and even small-scale lighting projects.
I was also intrigued when he mentioned the need to split the control of all the fixtures between several consoles. Obviously there is a limitation of 512 channels per DMX channels per universe, and those get filled up pretty quickly with all of the intelligent moving lights this show was using. But this got me thinking about whether it was necessary to account for transmission delay itself in this kind of huge application. Not only this, but when considering diesel costs for running the show, power loss of such long runs must be not insignificant.
All in all, as someone who lieks to pick shows apart and see how they work inside, this was quite interesting and left me asking a lot of questions.
The opening and closing ceremonies of the Olympics is a theatrical experience on a different scale and magnitude. Unlike Broadway shows which are popular on a national scale (and occasionally tours internationally), this is live-broadcasted and watched by audiences not only here in the U.S., but by audiences across the entire world. I had no idea that they had to make a decision between the 3 billion people watching television and the 75,000 in the stadium, and that the live Olympic stadium actually looked under lit in order to keep contrast ratios for good broadcast pictures- although that does make sense, if anything, I would've thought that the audience who were physically at the stadium were the ones who got the best experience. I didn't watch the closing ceremony this year, so I had no idea that they had no set, performers, stage, dress rehearsal, etc until the day before the closing ceremony and used projections onto big panels of parachute silk. I can't imagine the stress that they were under and how they accomplished everything in such a short amount of time.
Damn the Olympics are cool, although the Abu Dhabi National Day with the parade of tanks does sound really awesome. How does one get to become that kind of lighting designer? And what kind of lighting design is it really? So much of the design process happens once you get into the space and once you can actually turn stuff on and build your looks. I imagine that WYSIWYG helps with that a lot, but there will still be some element of architecture that isnt in the drawing somewhere, and at least one of your shots is going to the hit the back of a structural beam. Theater people have the best jobs, our hours are shitty, and the pay isnt that great, but we are exposed to all of the most interesting problems, who would have thought that the limiting factor to Olympic cuing time would be the price of diesel?
It's crazy to imagine the challenge of balancing the lighting environment for a live audience as well as for an audience at home watching through their television sets. Marenghi seems to have created an incredibly vibrant spectacle with his design. A design that was seen by so many millions of people. Like previous comments stated, Marenghi had to create a design that emphasized the relationship of all countries while still focusing on the fact that they were in Brazil, filled with so much culture and using that to infuse his design. I can only imagine the time it would've taken to focus all those lights and have gotten the media and lighting to correspond with each other. I am also very surprised to hear that they only had 1/3 of the usual budget and the time Marenghi had to design was 10 months. Great designers can do that though, just create art and make it look effortless even though it takes so much.
As someone who greatly values education, I really enjoyed the end of this article though the entire thing was extremely interesting. Starting with the end of the article, I really liked that the LD valued the fact that he brought on Brazilian assistants so that there were skills left in Brazil which did not exist before. I thought that was really really cool. In addition, I think the way the process was expressed in this article was extremely well done. I enjoyed hearing about arguably the largest struggle a lighting designer can face: lighting for live and television audiences. The difficulty of this task is exquisitely expressed and articulated by the LD. I also enjoyed hearing about the challenges of navigating the system in Brazil and the Olympics as a whole. Whether it is about resources, scheduling, money, ect., the LD had his response well articulated and it was interesting to hear the thought processes.
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