04.09.2018 | Meeting Services, Inc. Chooses Artiste Picasso for Large Conference Event

Lighting designer Leonard Delgado and the team at Meeting Services, Inc. were looking to move away from conventional fixtures on a large user conference event and found their new light in Elation Professional’s full-featured Artiste Picasso LED moving head.

“We’d been trying to find a fixture that would cover a 96-foot wide stage evenly and had our eye on the Artiste Picasso,” says MSI’s Leonard Delgado, who served as lighting designer on the conference. “We bench-tested a lot of lights that were similar to it with side-by-side shootouts and the Picasso outperformed them. The lumen count out of the Picasso was the leader, which was important as we didn’t want to limit ourselves on intensity.”

Leko and Fresnel replacement
MSI’s client was very particular about the look of the show, says Delgado, especially the look directly at the stage. “They like a real clean look and want no lighting from the back so that was a challenge. I had to come in from the high sides at a sharp angle and those lights are particular because they catch the side of the face.” The designer says that in past user conferences the shot was usually done with a 10-degree Leko shooting from about 110 feet away but for this year’s user conference all the Lekos were replaced with Artiste Picasso fixtures. “It was a turning point for me,” Delgado says. “I was able to shoot two Picassos 110', zoom at 7 degrees with frost engaged and 15% CTO and still I had to back them down to 75%.”

After he replaced all the Lekos in the set up with Artiste Picassos, Delgado took the opportunity to replace all the Fresnels as well. “The Picasso projects a nice out-of-focus wash with a nice even field,” he says of the fixture’s flexibility. “I used Frost 1 and didn’t lose a lot of intensity.”

On a staircase special the designer highlighted award winners by zooming the Picasso all the way out. Two high side Picassos would swing into position with one center-positioned fixture shooting down onto the staircase. The designer admits he kept a few Fresnels as backups as the Artiste Picasso was a new fixture for him, but says he didn’t have to use them.

A cleaner look
Part of Elation's award-winning, theatrical-grade Artiste series, the 23,000 lumen Artiste Picasso houses a 620W Cool White LED engine and advanced optical system for a powerful, crisp output and extremely uniform field of light. A total of 24 units were employed on the user conference, which, Delgado says, was a reduction in the number of lighting fixtures used compared to previous user conferences. Sixteen fixtures were spread along a long truss positioned over the audience with three units each on a side truss and one unit each on side finger trusses positioned over the audience.

When comparing the 2018 user conference with the event a year earlier, Delgado also says there is an obvious difference in the quality of light. “The Picasso look is a lot cleaner, a lot smoother,” he says. “The faces look a lot clearer and don’t look as pale.” According to Delgado, client staff concurred, saying that the show looked a lot cleaner compared to the harder conventional lights of years past.

Collaboration
This was MSI’s first experience working with Elation, a collaboration that benefited all parties involved and affected positively the development of the Artiste Picasso itself. Delgado explains: “We worked with [Elation Product Manager] Matthias Hinrichs to add some features to the light in the development stage that would be helpful to other LDs in the future. One was the ability to change the LED refresh rate at the console. On some of the cameras we have here at MSI we were getting a refresh rate roll. Our challenge was that the client brings in their own video studio back stage and do all the video editing immediately so they are very particular about the lighting. They record their shows in 1080p (the event had seven cameras – two of them booms) which was causing a lot of refresh rate roll in a lot of the LED fixtures we were using. So we changed the refresh rate at the fixture and controlled that via the console which is a good selling point for the fixture. It also meant we didn’t need to get to every fixture to do it directly, which would have been time and labor consuming.”

Delgado also helped design the rigging and projection for the user conference and was even drafted to drive one of the semi-trucks to the show when a driver was needed. Once there, he served as lighting board operator for the event, which was driven by two M-Series M1 lighting consoles networked together running nine universes through optical fiber. Lighting assistants were Christian Rufus and Ben Shaw.

About MSI Production Services (EST. 1946)
As with the rest of the country, San Diego in the 1940s saw unprecedented growth and technological advancement. Meeting Services, Inc. (MSI) was born out of this newfound prosperity, providing audio and lighting equipment to local companies. Over the years, as San Diego’s industry and tourism expanded, MSI did as well, expertly designing and installing state of the art sound systems for the smallest corporate meetings to the largest conferences, conventions, trade shows, fundraisers, sporting events, artistic performances, and political speeches. Today MSI offers a complete line of event production, technological support, and equipment rental services, and continues to ensure the success, efficiency, and productivity of our clients’ special gatherings, large and small, around the block and around the world.

For more information, contact:
Tom Bollard: tbollard(at)msiprod.com