The Grammy’s 2004

The music industry celebrated their annual awards show, the 46th Grammy Awards, on February 8th at the Staples Center in Los Angeles. Broadcast by CBS television, and squeezed in between sporting events, the show featured one of the largest intelligent lighting rigs you’ll find anywhere.

Prior to his lighting work on this year’s Academy Awards, award-winning lighting designer Bob Dickinson was again called upon by Grammy officials to create the lighting environment for presenters and top acts like Beyoncé and White Stripes. The stage design was quite unique and included a wrap around audience, mosh pits, three separate stages and huge, “bat wing” projection surfaces enveloping the stage. A battery of graceful truss arms flowing upwards from the bat wings gave the stage the appearance and feeling of flight.

"When I originally saw the design I realized that any kind of traditional truss installation would be destructive to the overall look of the show,” commented Dickinson, “so I tried to reflect the energy of the shapes that the production designers had offered, the bat wings. Those are very complex truss installations because the lights go from nearly vertical to nearly horizontal in the same truss. It was quite challenging.”

Dickinson used 159 MAC 2000 Wash in his design (nearly 1000 automated fixtures in all, plus conventionals) along with 125 Atomic strobes. The MAC 2000 Wash were located on those elegant truss structures as well as over head. “We also used them as floor units because they offer that good, powerful, non-ellipsoidal shaft of light that makes for a very current look,” Dickinson stated. “The approach was to use them primarily as backlight and scenic duty and for graphics in the air.”

Holding the Grammy’s in what is essentially a basketball arena rather than a theatre posed its own challenges. “Staples has a very high ceiling, it’s a very vertical venue which is happening more and more in these arenas because people want to be closer to the floor, and because of the corporate suites,” Dickinson states. “So they have a tendency to build them very tall. Because they sell the upper seats it tends to drive up your trims. Some of our trims were 75 feet in the air.”

Dickinson played, and often experimented, with light levels. As on the Academy Awards he keyed the show at 5000 degree Kelvin as opposed to the normal 3200 degree Kelvin, balancing the cameras into the high discharge color temperature allowing for colors to emerge as they actually appear to the naked eye on television. “On those two shows (Oscars and Grammy’s), which were both done in high definition, it made a dramatic difference in our color options. On many productions it is not feasible to do this because we have to balance the audience lights and everything to 5000 degree Kelvin, which becomes problematic. But on shows like the Oscars and Grammy’s it really makes a difference in color interpretation.” For one edgy White Stripes number Dickinson took a single MAC 2000 Wash and focused it directly into the camera to increase the intensity.

“Because the MAC 2000 Wash can get so tight in its beam it can survive the demands of a large format installation like the Grammy’s,” Dickinson commented. “I was introduced to the MAC 2000 Wash about a year and a half ago. I was very enthused by it because of its flood to spot ratio, and the color temperature, which I found to be very pleasing. The intensity is also definitely there and it has a good color palette as well.”

California-based Production Lighting Systems (PLS) of the Fourth Phase/PRG lighting group, and VLPS Lighting Services supplied all lighting for the show.

Lighting Designer: Bob Dickinson
Lighting Director: Andy O’Reilly
Lighting Programmers: Andy O’Reilly, Matt Firestone, Gil Samuelian