US-based lighting and video designer Tony Caporale was at the visual helm for the new ‘Triller’ boxing and music event in Atlanta, harnessing the punch and power of Hippotizer Boreal+ Media Servers to drive a host of LED screens at the city’s Mercedes-Benz Stadium.
Music heavyweights including Snoop Dogg, Justin Bieber and Diplo joined boxing big-timers Jake Paul and Ben Askren for the event, which took the US by storm.
A pay-per-view audience of more than 1.5 million watched as the fights were interjected by pop performances, with each requiring a feast of visual delights to match the action. The boxing ring area had two portrait LED video screens for fighter entrances, a single LED video wall above the announcer booth, with another LED screen used as a fascia for Diplo’s DJ booth. The performance stage had five screens.
“This was a lot of video, right?” says Caporale, who was brought in by project Lighting Designer Tom Kenny and PRG Account Rep Anthony ‘Looch’ Ciampa. “But that’s not all – we also rigged a load of Revolution Blade LED strips and VDO Sceptrons throughout the set scaffolding, driving the content across the whole stadium. We pushed the visuals to the limit, and I’m happy to say the two Boreal+ servers handled it all, considering how hard we were pushing them.”
Caporale discussed the hefty visual requirements in pre-production with Luke Lewis and Anthony Wilson from PRG, and landed on the Boreal+ Servers.
“I knew we had to have Hippotizer’s + models out there to handle the weight of this show,” explains Caporale. “I had a lot of mixes to distribute so I needed a workhorse I could rely on.”
Visuals for the fight action were created by Studio Moross, with each music artist’s creative teams submitting their own content for the performance stage. In addition, Triller show creators Ryan Kavanaugh and Bert Marcus and their teams supplied promo material and additional b-roll footage. For the performance stage, all the content was locked to timecode and provided by the respective artists’ creative teams.
The rig was controlled by a main and tracking backup for both the grandMA2 consoles and Boreal+ Media Servers via MAnet.
“One of the things that impressed me most about using the Boreal+ was the Fade on Layer feature, which was key,” says Caporale. “Since I had so many mixes to distribute content through, I knew I was already taxing the layer count on some of the mixes and it was dragging my FPS. I was able change a few mixes from eight layers to four and along with the use of relay I managed to save enough system resources.”
The results were, in a word, big, as Caporale continues: “The show designers created a look that was very industrial and edgy. Tom definitely wanted this to feel like a concert and not bland. With all the screens scattered around the set, along with the Revolution Blades and Sceptrons, it gave the staging a lot of depth so there were a lot of different ways to break it up or make it feel unified.
“For some looks, I would select a cool geometric pattern to flow through the blades and match the tempo of the song. In other instances, I utilized the relay feature and sampled a piece of the artist content in the Blades, especially if they had music hits and accents in their content so it could translate through the Blades musically. For an event of this size, you go with what you know best and what can proficiently get you the results you need.”
For the Atlanta Triller event, Dave Gelineau from Echo Entertainment served as Producer/Director, Rick Seigel as Director of Photography, Drew Rivera as Visionary Group Technical Director, with Visionary Group overseeing Creative and Art Direction alongside Mike Hess and Juliana Jaramillo as Art Directors.
Photo: © Triller Fight Club