Light Art Studios, a young five-headed preprogramming studio, newly established in Hamburg, Germany were responsible for this year’s creative part of lighting design at the venerable German entertainment show “Wetten, dass..?”. The show around cult presenter Thomas Gottschalk attracts an audience of millions every year and is structured around bets to be won by various participants. In addition, world-famous show acts also perform and heat up the audience between the bets.
The studio, in which the preprogramming for these shows took place, includes two fixed lighting desk workstations and an optional additional workstation as well as a dedicated 3D workstation. The team is primarily active in the areas of TV, concert, touring, theater, musicals, trade shows, advertising and corporate. A special feature of the new studio in Hamburg is also that it is open to other designers and operators.
As for the show act itself, no other than famous music acts such as Robbie Williams, Tate McRae, the Moulin Rouge musical show and famous German singer-songwriter Herbert Grönemeyer were entertaining the audience in between the candidates and their bets. Light Art Studios worked very closely with the lighting designers of the various acts, to ensure a fabulous show experience for the live audience as well as everyone in front of their TVs. Lucas Hoyer, employee at the studio, thereby did the work on the Depence file while preprogramming. Raphael Grebenstein was responsible for the lighting direction and operation for all four show acts. The main client for the production was the German TV channel ZDF, on which the program was also broadcast. ZDF also provided the responsible Director of Photography Volker Schmidt and Tom Stockinger as well as the operators for deco light and white light. The decorative light was set up on site by ZDF as well.
“Depence is an integral part of our workflow, both to quickly present results to clients in the form of renderings, to check feasibility in set designs, and to pre-program productions and save time and money on location.” – Raphael Grebenstein, 2022
In their workflow, Light Art Studios first worked with Vectorworks to draw the plans for the show concept, this also included addressing the lights on stage. The set design was then mostly created in Cinema4D, which was then edited and polished again in Depence. The same applies to the LED wall and UV mapping. In Depence, all the threads then came together, and the various project elements were merged thanks to the extensive import functions of the software. This was followed by an adjustment of the respective textures. In the Depence project, different layers have now been created to manage the shows of the four acts. The camera movements were then carried out via DMX camera.
“Since we now have 3D CAD plans available in 90% of cases anyway, the import into Depence is done quickly and so results can be achieved quickly even on the road without a lighting desk. Fast support is also another PLUS.”
The project itself relied on the following equipment:
170x Martin Mac Encore
160x Elation Smarty Hybrid
61x Martin Mac Quantum
51x Robe Robin 800 LED
JB Lighting Sparx18
5x Robe Forte Followspot
3x Robe Forte
19x GLP S350
58x GLP JDC-1
180x Expolite Tourled42
12x GLP creativ light1
48x Varilite VL5 LED
06x GrandMA3 light
12x GrandMA3 PU
13x GrandMA3 8port Node
2x GrandMA3 4port Node
Live-Picture Credit: ZDF / Sascha Baumann
