A runaway hit, La Banda reached an impressive 18.8m total viewers in its first season
USA - A new and unproven programme that opens against the season debut of the NFL's Sunday Night Football, the US Open Men's Finals and the return of Fear of the Walking Dead might not be expected to draw a large audience, but Univision's La Banda defied expectations by pulling in 2.6m viewers in the US and earning the distinction of being the most tweeted about program in its time slot when it premiered on 13 September. It helped that the Simon Cowell-produced reality show, which searched for the next Latin boy band, had stars like Ricky Martin on its panel of judges, was brimming with vibrant young talent, and featured a scintillating Tom Sutherland-designed lightshow.

Sutherland and lighting director/programmer Craig Caserta used a large and varying collection of Chauvet Professional fixtures to spice up the set and support the performances of the aspiring young artists during La Banda's three-month inaugural season. "We wanted to create bold looks for each of the performers who competed during the course of the show," said Sutherland. "So naturally we wanted to change up the design from episode to episode, while still remaining consistent."

Although the exact number of fixtures in the La Banda rig varied from one episode to the next, it included an average of 16 Nexus 4x4 COB LED panels, 40 COLORdash Accent RGBW fixtures and 20 COLORado 1-Tri Tour par style units, as well as a variety of hybrids, moving beams, spots and washes. In keeping with the designer's goal of constantly changing looks, the fixtures were positioned differently on structures that were reconfigured for every episode.

A key contributor to the variety that enlivened the set were the Nexus panels. Using a grandMA2 full-size console, Caserta controlled each of the 27-watt RGB cells in every Nexus unit individually to create patterns and shapes that morphed throughout the performances. (Chris Delorenzo, a programmer on the design team, used a grandMA2 Lite to control audience and dancer lighting packages.)

"Nexus gave us great eye candy that not only looked good live, but came off very well on camera," said Caserta. "We got a wide variety of colours from the panels, and we used them all to match the lighting and video for each particular song. So just by playing with different patterns and changing colours, we got a lot of different looks from the Nexus without having to go to a new fixture, which really helped make life easier for us over the course of the entire season."

(Jim Evans)


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