JOSH GROBAN FINISHED RECORDING his album “Harmony” during the pandemic. To mark the release of the new record, a livestream was scheduled for Thanksgiving Day 2020 and the iconic Mack Sennett studio was chosen as the ideal location to host the event.

You never know how one detail might inspire an entire design. In this case, it was the Manfrotto Pantograph lighting mounts that caught my eye in a catalog. Martin Kelley, my rental rep at Christie Lites, mentioned that he had several of these available. I loved the architecture the pantographs created as they hung down from the grid with an ETC Fresnel affixed to each. We then added several more Fresnels on stands, evoking a stalactite-stalagmite relationship that made the active lighting fixtures equally important as set pieces.

The all-white void of the Mack Sennett cove and floor provided lovely and stark contrast to the black piano, lighting fixtures, music stands and even the cables on the floor! We considered some kind of black floor treatment until Josh said “no, I want to see the cables and everything!” The set then became an homage in some ways to a Beatles TV shoot from the 60’s, which was then transformed from song to song with the rich colours from LED fixtures and texture from some “old school” gobo projection on the white wall from modern automated luminaires.

It was exciting to be in the room operating the lights as people from all over the world tuned in via the Internet to watch our studio performance in real time!