Held in early October, the third edition of the Saudi Arabia’s largest annual national sporting event, the Saudi Games, saw more than 9,000 athletes competing in 52 sports. With the opening ceremony taking place not in a traditional stadium but in Riyadh’s Boulevard City, Lighting and Stage Designer Steve Wary was charged with creating an aesthetic to get the games off to a dynamic start.
The location presented a great opportunity to use the LED screens already present on the buildings, which served as the backdrop for a centrally positioned stage big enough to host the impressive parade of athletes captured for broadcast by two drones. The games’ symbolic flame needed to be a key feature of the design, and Wary had to create a lighting device that could add depth and substance to the production without obstructing the LED screens.
To achieve all this, Wary designed a stage consisting of two overlapping rings, 36m by 18m in diameter, with a slope of 7°. At the top centre of the stage, he integrated the flame’s cauldron along with a flat area for speeches and the ceremonial portion of the event.
Wary distributed the lighting across four levels at stage height, including laser beams on the floor, eight rounded towers for beams and back spots and three more towers behind the stands for FOH spotlights and 24 Claypaky B-EYE K20 washes. He mounted 50 Skylos on the rooftops in the background of the show.
“The Skylos created beams of light in the Riyadh sky, which is very favourable for this purpose since there is haze all year round that creates a nice mist,” noted Wary. “The B-EYE K20 washes on the main FOH tower helped create an even area to emphasise the FOH up close. They proved their worth since we needed a powerful light output and a good beam angle to assist the FOH projectors in areas we couldn’t reach.”
The Saudi Games marked the first time that Wary used Skylos, which he described as, “the ideal choice for this kind of large-scale show. They are made for outdoor use, and I knew they would withstand the high temperatures of this country during full sun. Despite the lens treatment and their ability to endure extreme temperatures, we still planned a head-down position in the console to protect the lenses during the day.”
To create large beams in the sky, he mounted the Skylos atop rooftops, giving texture to the Riyadh sky. “The power of Skylos quickly got everyone on the same wavelength, and there were exclamations of ‘wow!’ everywhere as I turned them on and people looked up,” he said.
Wary reported several “major advantages” of the Skylos: “First, there were excellent choices on the colour wheel, making it clear that each colour was chosen to lose the least possible power in light output, particularly the amber colours that are generally hard to bring out in a large beam – on Skylos these colours were impressive,” he stated. “Another pleasant surprise came from the prism. It was also designed to lose minimal light output once it entered the beam, allowing me to magically texture the sky with the prisms and add another dimension to a simple beam.”
LAB2580 handled the show production with the lighting provided by LabLive and SLS Production. Jean-Yves Orcel was the Lighting Director. The Lighting Operators were Steve Wary and Jerome Claude.
Photo: YourWolfAgency
