Live Design Online: Roland Greil and his team did the full lighting design, creation of the previz environments/ files, programming, and ultimate delivery of the lighting for the Opening Ceremony of the 2023 AFC (Asian Football Confederation) Asian Cup on January 12, 2024 in Doha, Qatar. Live Design chats with the designer about his involvement and the challenges of such a project.
2 comments:
I've been thinking more about what I want my future career in theater to be like. And I think that lighting events such as this would be a really fun thing to design as a profession. I just really like how the designers are given a lot of freedom to express their artistic vision, and it's really exciting to see how they can make use of that. One of the interesting parts about the show in particular is that they used Depence 3 systems, which I would like to learn more about. Something that caught my eye about the creative process is that they used animatics to communicate with other creative departments, and that's not something that I typically associate with theater, but is definitely something that I’ll keep in the back of my mind for design work. It’s fascinating that, because it’s not a run of shows like theater, they do a ton of work for a relatively small time frame, but one that still is effective in moving an audience. This specific event was also really cool because they had to load out the entire thing in less than 30 minutes, in order to still make the soccer kick-off on time.
To speak candidly, I found this article quite overwhelming to read. I’m super interested in lighting, however, do not know concert, arena, and spectacle lighting really at all. The rattling off of previsualization, 600+ moving lights, LED walls, and 360 design is something I can’t imagine being executed successfully, given all the elements it includes. While a bit overwhelming, this article does inspire me to engage with this spectacle lighting style more. I’ve always focused on the nuanced possibilities in traditional theatre lighting, but maybe if I had the vocabulary for arena lighting, I’d want to focus on that more too. I do wish this article talked more about the technical management of putting this whole event together. Loading in 600 moving lights seems quite intense, and I would love to learn more about how they scheduled and accomplished it. I know budgets for these commercial events are high, and thus, allow for a lot of stagehands, but the management of it is still fascinating to me.
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