Lighting designer Bruno Poet adopted SGM's LED luminaires for ice skating show Intimissimi On Ice. (All Photo Courtesy of SGM)

Award-winning lighting designer Bruno Poet felt privileged and inspired when offered to work in Verona Arena with the spectacular live show Intimissimi On Ice. At the same, this was his first opportunity to deploy SGM’s LED luminaires in his creative design.

Show director, Francisco Negrin, describes the elegant ice-skating show as “a generator of the energy of shadows and light”. The two acts depict very different aspects, where Act I starts with the dark energy in violent and chaotic forms exploring the dark sides of male/female relationships with both loneliness and desire. The desire turns into passionate lust and then into real love. Act II, however, is about light, joy, playfulness culminating in a celebrational finale. 

An ice skating show is the energy generator of light and shadows, siad the Show director, Francisco Negrin.

For such an impressive and emotional show, lighting played an essential role. And with a lighting designer on board internationally recognised for his lighting for large scale live performances, many versatile effects were taken into use.

“I have a particular interest in working on productions, which rely on a bold lighting design to engage the audience and tell the story. I love collaborating with creative and technical teams to make thrilling live shows”, says Bruno Poet.

Using the entire open-air arena as canvas

Bruno Poet opted for a SGM LED solution. “These LED lights provided the most flexible solution for the jobs I needed them to do. There are no conventional fixtures that could have been used in this way. I see it as choosing the best tool for the job”.

LED luminaires include blinders, wash lights were all used to illuminate the show.

Rental company, Musical Box, from Verona supplied 150 SGM RGBA SixPack LED blinders, containing each six individually controllable 40W outputs, and 82 SGM P-5 RGBW wash lights, receiving the lighting designer’s full recommendations for their handling of the entire process.

The impressive facilities of Verona Arena demanded for an extraordinary presentation while at the same time providing some challenges for the lighting designer in the sense of there being no roof structure. “It’s a technical challenge when you cannot hang lights overhead, and have to protect all the equipment from the rain. Another issue is dealing with the ice and the projection - any light that hits the surface of the ice kills the projection, and any backlight reflects off the ice and blinds the audience,” says Poet.

A scene of the ice skating show.

Selecting lighting fixtures from SGM eliminated the need for protecting the lights as they are IP65 rated, which was one of the main reasons for the designer to specify them for this show and for a future outdoor project in Bregenz.

The many SGM luminaires where deployed for different effects and purposes for Intimissimi On Ice. Bruno Poet explains: “The SixPacks framed the set. We used them both for decoration (eye candy for the cameras) and for effects. We controlled each cell individually, so we could send pulses of light around all 150 of them. They looked great - really punchy. The P-5s were used in two ways. One group was rigged all around the perimeter of the arena to light the architecture, and to wash the audience in colours. They are incredibly bright for their size and power consumption, and being waterproof they did not need to be covered every time it rained. They looked great - especially in the overhead camera shots filmed for TV.  A second group did a similar job to uplight the empty steps of the arena, rigged upstage of the stage set. The rest of the P-5s were used as footlights at the front of the stage for lighting the cast, without spilling light onto the ice.”

Such came about the magnificent journey of the show interpreted by international ice-skating champions accompanied by lyrical and pop music featuring special guest star, Ellie Goulding. The producers and creative teams for both live show and TV show were all delighted, informs Poet as he is already well into his next exciting project.