This season’s opening at Madison Square Garden for the New York Rangers was a spectacular theatrical mix, featuring kabuki drops and FireFly projectors, along with dozens of moving lights. The Firefly projectors were used by Dierson to project large format images of the season’s players on to free-floating white drapery which then dropped, right on cue, to the ice.

Lighting designer Patrick Dierson and assistant lighting designer/programmer Demfis Fyssicopulos pre-programmed the entire show at the Prelite Studio in New York City. Their console of choice is the grandMA from MA Lighting, distributed in North America by A.C.T Lighting Inc, and supplied, along with the rest of the lighting equipment by Light Action of Willmington, Delaware.

"This was a pretty interesting show from the control point of view," said Dierson. "We were using the main grandMA console and the in-house grandMA Light console to control different parts of the rig. Demfis and I like working in close proximity where we can bounce ideas off of each other. This does mean, however, that in a huge venue such as this you don't have the advantage of a second pair of eyes in a different location. To get around this we would often use the grandMA offline software, running on a PC, to control one of the consoles remotely."

(Lee Baldock)


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