SCREENCAP : YOUTUBE / HALO ESPORTS
THE BROADCAST DESK AS SHOWN DURING THE LIVESTREAM
Those are all the elements that are always there and we have to design around … Player lighting is quite important , because it ’ s always the utmost priority that they can ’ t be bothered during gameplay by flashing lights or whatever , but we also need to see them on the broadcast ; so , you have to balance this .”
Gentilhomme , who was the acting LD for the event , details that he will typically do a CAD drawing of the stage in WYSIWYG , then export that into MVR for previs rending in Depence 2 . For this show in particular , he highlights some of his specific thoughts when building his design :
Thomas Gentilhomme : Usually I would probably add more lights on to the audience ; usually I ’ ll light the sitting rows and one side is going to be Team Red and one Team Blue …
But yeah , usually it ’ s a lot of eye candy stuff , a lot of just making it look good on camera . So , we don ’ t see the stage that much in the streams ; usually the people that watch these things online , they want to see the gameplay . [ However ,] you want to make sure that in every camera angle , you ’ re gonna get something – like , here ’ s the [ Martin ] Sceptrons , I had some [ Robe ] Spikies onstage – some [ colour ] in the background , so you can see which team it is at-a-glance , right ? That ’ s what you have to keep in mind when designing for camera stuff .
For this show , originally , we had the Spikies as my main beams , and a couple LEDBeam 150s
from Robe as well for washes ; the Sceptrons from Martin for the linear stuff , and we also had some profiles , but we had to tweak a little bit because of availability . So , we ended up having the [ Claypaky ] Scenius Unicos as my main profiles , and [ Robe ] Spiiders for my washes . It was pretty much that , and then a couple of [ Chroma-Q ] Color Force and Studio Force for backdrop lighting and talent lighting on the casters ’ desk , then the Sceptrons and Portmans , obviously ; I run that all from a grandMA3 Light in Mode 3 . I like the challenge .
Gentilhomme also ended up programming the team graphics for the event , which isn ’ t usually the case , but his solution was very streamlined , as he explains . “ I didn ’ t want to use a StreamDeck and the grandMA3 at the same time , so I thought ‘ you know what , I ’ m just going to integrate everything in the same place .’ So , I programmed a couple macros on the MA3 , which basically selected my team colours , team graphics , and triggering Resolume from OSC triggers directly on the board – so , just a couple of buttons to select the teams , and then manual triggers for winning sequences and stuff like that .”
Upon mentioning specific teams ’ graphics and colours , it piqued my interest in how team branding plays into colour selection ; specifically , whether Gentilhomme receives specific hex codes or colours to use , or if it ’ s all eyeballed in . “ They ’ re very nice , and they always send the hex codes ,” he chuckles , before explaining that while it ’ s useful in theory , a human touch is more or less mandatory to nail the colours . “ Even if I put the RGB values in to my LEDs , it never renders exactly what the colour is so you have to do it by eye – and usually , it ’ s not even by eye ; it ’ s through the camera … For this particular event , we knew which teams were competing against each other , so there was a fixed selection of 16 colours , but a lot of them were red , or red-ish , or very red , or not as red , so I would just have to tweak them a little bit so they look different .
“ Some tournaments , they want to stay with the game colours ,” Gentilhomme continues . “ Like for Rocket League , where it would be orange and blue , or Halo could be red versus green or red versus blue , but here it was suggested that we could use the team colours . So . it was a bit more work on my end to make it all work , but it looks better when it ’ s all integrated between the graphics on the LED wall and the lighting onstage .”
Speaking of the LED wall , this show employed Unilumin 2.6mm screens controlled by Novastar MCTRL4K processors , with graphics generated by the Resolume server mentioned earlier . An Arkaos Media Server was also in use running drawings for the Sceptron fixtures , which Gentilhomme says were triggered using Art-Net and output feedback from the grandMA3 using NDI . Also involved in show control were four Luminex sACN nodes .
Sciortino points out that designing one of these productions is not only highly-dependant
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