grandMA3 Shines on Canada's Star Academie Reality TV Series

	"We need to work fast. We come in the day of the show and there are 19 songs to deal with...So we make the dashboard ready off site but we program each show on site. grandMA3 is a great tool that makes it easy for us to work quickly," says Larivee.

Montreal-based Luz is using the grandMA3 platform to drive lighting and video servers for Star Academie, a reality TV series aimed primarily at Quebec viewers and featuring an array of young women and men under the age of 30 competing for the title of the next solo singing sensation. ACT Entertainment is the exclusive distributor of MA Lighting products in North America.

Star Academie launched in 2003. The current series runs 12 weeks concluding in April. It garners more than 1.8 million viewers per week.

Luz provides the show's lighting design, video content for set extensions, and control of virtual lighting and color for panels within the on-set screens. The set features angled LED videowalls connected to each other with vertical rows of beam lights. Within each LED wall are multiple windows; a series of cube-shaped screens is flown above the set.

"grandMA3 controls more than 800 lighting fixtures with 55,572 active parameters and two SMOD video servers driving the LED videowalls in the backdrop, on the floor and in four pods," says Matthieu Larivee, creative producer and partner at Luz who manages the project. "Two grandMA3 full-size consoles are dedicated to the main lighting system, a grandMA3 compact XT is used for the ROBE RoboSpots and a grandMA3 light for the video." grandMA3 processing units include three PU Ms, one PU L and one PU XL. Omnison, Montreal is providing the grandMA3 systems.

grandMA3 was a logical choice for the show, Larivee says, due to the massive number of fixtures and parameters, LED video content and speed required for the production. "We need to work fast. We come in the day of the show and there are 19 songs to deal with. Every show has a different artistic direction: The moving parts are all different, the use of video is different. So we make the dashboard ready off site but we program each show on site. grandMA3 is a great tool that makes it easy for us to work quickly, networking and sharing the process. The dashboard is very reactive and precise and less time consuming than before. And we have the ability to control all the instances within the fixtures, which no other system can do."

The grandMA3 has a 285mb show file and uses NDI from the video servers. It outputs sACN for the main rig and Art-Net to the ROBE RoboSpots and video servers.

Luz's David Rondeau, the show's director of photography, oversees the lighting department and has input on the visuals and the video OP. He uses one of the grandMA3 full-size desks to mainly control the key lights. "I'm using a lot of ALL presets to make sure the lights go to the exact same settings since intensity, focus and color are key elements that have to be consistent, and multiple ALL pools are very useful to organize," he says.

Lighting director Pierre-Luc Bedard has another full-size console to control 90 percent of the rig, with a lot of layouts and groups. "He is constantly building new looks and phasers, and there are a lot of manual triggers to punt as well," Rondeau notes.

Followspot Caller Annie Belair uses the grandMA3 compact XT. "It allows her to trim intensity on the fly and trigger some color changes. Since the ROBE RoboSpots all have a front and two backs, she can choose which light goes on or off, while the operator aims and irises," explains Rondeau.

Video operator Zachary Cajolais deploys the grandMA3 light to control the video server timeline. "He also has a lot of manuals and punting video layers, and he controls all the LED integrations through the servers," says Rondeau. "Being in the same show file, this allows us to have some nice synchronized punches of lighting and video when needed, and we can help him manage some of the integrations when he's overwhelmed!"

A number of grandMA3 features makes a difference on the show, according to Rondeau. "Data Pools allow us to manage our own groups, presets and sequences while being able to share with others. For example, since the spot caller has little knowledge of grandMA, I keep her in my data pool and can easily program features and color changes for her and place them on her desk quickly so she can use them. Using layouts I can have a pool of my own, and a pool for the LD so I can check or act on his rig quickly.

"We also created a Common Data Pool where we keep a copy of all the useful presets and phasers so we can share them in an organized manner without having to re-create them in our data pool or trying to find them the someone else's pool."

Additionally, "the MVR (My Virtual Rig data sharing file format) allowed us to rapidly incorporate the design in the desk and do some basic previs," says Rondeau. "The NDI input bitmap is used a lot from the video servers and thrown in our moving head arrays.

"The Selection Grid also helps us with 162 multi- instance moving heads, so we are able to quickly select columns on lights and not have to go through each one when pressing 'next' and 'previous.' It's also helpful when creating effects to manage the selection in combination with ma-tricks."

In short, "grandMA3 is great!" says Rondeau.