2004
Products: Versa TILE
Lighting Director: Christian Choi

This year's Super Bowl halftime show unquestionably surpassed its predecessors in terms of stunning and memorable images--and some of the best had nothing to do with a certain "wardrobe malfunction." Incorporated into the staging design by Mark Fisher Studios' production team, 76 Versa TILE units from Element Labs provided an appreciative amount of visual support for the lighting design (by LD Allen Branton) as well.

"The Versa TILEs were phenomenal," raves lighting director Christian Choi. "They worked out great. Allen and I were really impressed with their performance."

The Versa tiles lit up 8 sections of stage along the perimeter of the stage riser. Half of them were 8 panels wide, at 40 pixels wide and 5 pixels high and the other half consisted of 11 panels, at 55 pixels wide and 5 pixels high.

Choi used Adobe After Effects software to create custom content, which he matched pixel by pixel and then uploaded onto 2 High End Systems' Catalyst(R) Version 3 Media Servers. Choi triggered all the lighting effects through a Wholehog(R) II console. Data was sent to the Catalyst server, which was in turn connected to the Versa DRIVE processor that sent the cues to the tiles for a seamless integration of lighting and video looks.

"I built them into my lighting cues so it was all in sync, and I would freeze them in open white or strobe them in blocks or bring them into a wide range of different colors," he explains.

Choi also brought in video clips that he scaled down for the TILEs' size. "The combination of Catalyst and Versa tile was amazing," he says. "In contrast to regular LEDs and projection, it really stood out as another great video element. They're crisp, clear, and very bright and they provide a pure digital representation of whatever you put up there. It's a very cool and different look that complements regular video, standard projection, or LED. It's really a big step forward."

Photo courtesy of Mark Fisher