Lighting designer for SA’s own Take Me Out show shares the details and challenges
of lighting for the show…

The South African version of the UK’s famous Take Me Out dating game show was
brought here by Archie Tigere of Tigere Productions. The 13-episode show began
airing in July on SABC1 at 21H00 on Tuesday nights.

Tigere contracted Keystone Productions’ Chris Bolton to do the lighting design, which
posed some interesting challenges due to the nature of the show. The set was
shipped in containers from the UK and set up and rigged up in the Durban
Convention Centre. “The convention centre is obviously not your typical studio, but
was the chosen location due to the sheer height needed for the trussing and rigging.
The highest point of the rig is 8.5 metres,’ explains Bolton.

Gearhouse subsidiary LEDVision supplied most of the LED screens while Gearhouse
supplied the rigging, lighting and power supply, including all set lighting as well as
show lighting elements, and Bolton was responsible for the lighting control, using a
Hippotizer media server for the video lighting elements. “The entire crew had only
eight days to build and shoot all 13 episodes, so challenges along the way were
somewhat inevitable.’

The show

The objective of the show is for one single man to get a date with one of 30 single
women. The women stand on stage underneath 60 white lights, each with a button
in front of them. The man is then brought down on stage via the “Love Lift’ and tries
to persuade the women to agree to a date in a series of rounds, playing a pre-
recorded video discussing his background, displaying a skill (such as dancing or
playing a musical instrument), or playing another video in which the man’s friends
or family reveal more about his virtues and philosophy.

Each woman stands at a lighted podium with a switch that controls her fate for a
date: if she thinks it’s a match, she keeps her light on; if her attraction has been
short-circuited, then the lights turn red on her and she waits for the next potential
Mr Right.

The lights

Each girl’s button on the podium in front of her is connected to the lighting console
and media server. Each girl also has a Martin Mac Viper lighting her from the front
and a 101 beam from the back. As the girls vote, the LED screen in front of their
podium and the lights above them are synchronised, so the girl and the screen go
red, explains Bolton.

“It’s an intricate system. The bulk of the show is lit very brightly, and the girls
needed to be lit individually, so strong contrasting colours were needed to get them
to pop on TV,’ says Bolton. “The challenge involved lighting up the girls perfectly
and not letting any of the light beams cross over each other as the gap between
each girl was only 200mm.’

The Mac Vipers were chosen because they allowed Bolton to colour correct the
output properly for TV and they make for very good tight beams. “I needed to be
able to go from a wide smooth white light into columns of red when the girls vote –
so I needed to wash and beam each girl,’ he says, adding that it took a lot of time
to program the Vipers and set them up in such a way.

One of the challenges Bolton had with the Vipers was that they were all different
intensities because the bulbs had different lamp hours, which is very noticeable on
TV. “We then selected one of the Vipers and matched all of the lamps on the lights
to it. The functionality of the Vipers were phenomenal.’ Other lights included 24 x
Vari-Lite VLX to wash the set with and 18 x Robe Robin 600s to light the audience.
All of the rigging was done from a big rigging truss that circled the set, supplied by
Gearhouse, and throughout the show, animations run across the LED screens on the
podiums as well as the strip LEDs above and behind the action of the show.

Gearhouse also supplied two large side LED screens to show video to the girls.
In the centre circle of the set, where the host, Phat Joe, and the single man stand,
there are 61 x par 36 LED fixtures which were pixel mapped with a media server.<
“All of the Longman LED battens that go all the way round the set, including the
ones at the top, were pixel mapped, making a really nice animation movement
through the lighting in the set,’ explains Bolton.

The dating show proved to be a success in the UK and in Australia where the
original concept was birthed. The South African show promises to provide viewers
with a whole new level of entertaining TV – full of fun and romance.