DALLAS – The stage was big, over 200-feet wide and 100-feet long. So too was the venue, the 510,000 sq. ft. Ford Center at The Star in Frisco, TX, the practice facility of the Dallas Cowboys. Good thing too… because the Academy of Country Music Awards went all out this May to celebrate its 60th anniversary with a spectacularly extravagant show that featured a plethora of stars representing all of the many eras and facets of this vibrant, ever-changing genre.

Tying it all together was a beautifully balanced lighting design by Michael Berger and Travis Hagenbuch that created an engaging atmosphere on stage and throughout the room, while ensuring camera-friendly looks for each magical moment during the almost three-hour broadcast, which was streamed live on Amazon Prime.

“Because of the set and venue’s scale, we started by exploring fixtures that existed in the hundreds-quantities to fill the space,” said Berger. “The rig was designed to both make a visual statement in the room as well as provide the practical positions needed to light the show. We started down a parallel path of creating an interesting overhead shape while adding in the necessary lights to illuminate the award portions of the show. Eventually we brought together both of these ideas and landed with what audiences saw on the broadcast.”

“We started this year with a brief exploration of some shapes and images for the light wall that weren’t just our usual assortment of vertical towers,” said Berger. “Once we landed on the angular shapes that play off the existing side walls, we started looking at fixture options.”

This search ultimately led them to the COLORado PXL Curve 12 from CHAUVET Professional. “The one-meter length of the PXL laid in very cleanly with the sketches we had made,” said Berger. “We liked the idea of hundreds of individually moveable heads rather than a single bar where we would have had a much smaller number. The flexibility of individual tilt and zoom of this batten really helped us create a number of different visuals on out light wall throughout the broadcast.”

Kinetic Lighting supplied the 42 COLORado PXL Curve 12 units for the all-important light wall. The rest of the rig came primarily from PRG Los Angeles. This included STRIKE Array 2C blinders on the front of Lainey Wilson’s band risers; and some OnAir 1 panels backstage.

The looks created on the light wall as well as those throughout the massive rig not only engaged the live audience at the big venue, but they also worked well on camera. “The show operated much like a traditionally broadcast event, except there are far fewer commercial breaks,” said Hagenbuch. “This complicated things like stage reset time between performances and also made us mindful of how much can realistically get set up while designing looks.”

Berger and Hagenbuch credit all involved in this ambitious production with helping it come off smoothly, beginning with 22°, which provided the comprehensive package of staff and equipment. They singled out the work of their tireless PRG rep, Tony Ward, who was also the Gaffer on the show, as well as PRG Chief Tech and networking guru Jason Trowbridge , along with the entire crew of six PRG Techs, eight traveling Best Boys, and four traveling spot ops, plus the local Dallas crew.

“This was very much a stadium scale show,” said Berger. “In addition to the main show rig, we want to create sense of intimacy with a bespoke floor package for most performances. We thought about all the ways to accomplish this and came up with a new approach for the light wall centered around the PXL Curves.”