Annual MDA: Show of Strength Telethon Features Creative Lighting Design

	2013 MDA: Show of Strength Telethon. Photo: Design Partners

Production for this year's MDA: Show of Strength event was provided by R.A. (RAC) Clark, longtime executive producer of the Academy of Country Music Awards. Clark served as the MDA telethon's executive producer in 2012 and returned again this year. Clark has extensive producing credits on all major networks, including ABC. Debbie Williams, who has been with the telethon for many years, will produce again this year. Directing was handled once again by Gregg Gelfand. The production, taped in early August at Stage 46 of CBS TV City in Hollywood, featured a production design by Joe Stewart of Shaffner/Stewart with art direction by Tina Miller and staging supervised by Michael Cooper. Lighting designer Lee Rose was ably assisted in executing the lighting design by Design Partners lighting director Jenny Bloom.

The lighting design was built around the production designs use of five large portrait-oriented LED displays. Vertical towers off the sides of the screens were used as positions for the Aytron Magic Panel LED fixtures, provided by Morpheus Lights. Each fixtures contains a square of 36 RGBW LED-emmiters and were used both via DMX control and were pixel mapped to the production's media servers. This allowed for both standard lighting effects as well as an extension to the LED displays thus giving the production a more varied look for the performances.

Also key to the lighting design was the use of PRG's Best Boy spot fixtures. These provided the backbone to the stage lighting along with Vari-Lite VL-3000 Spots, VL-2500 Washs, and Martin Mac Auras. PRG was the main lighting vendor for the show with account executive Tony Ward handling the package.

Other lighting/video staff for the production included: programmers, Paul Lennon, Michael Updegraff; chief lighting technician, Kelly Waldman; assistant chief lighting technician, Christian Killingsworth; lead PRG tech, Steve Oleniczak; screens producer, Juli Pritchard; and screens programmer, Michael Zinman.

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