PWL was awarded the project by Doha-based event company The Planners who, combined with TCS and Trimex, has become a major player in the country for such shows and events.
Painting with Light (PWL) lighted the opening ceremony (OC) of the first Qatar eSports WEGA Global Games, held at the Khalifa Stadium in Doha on January 16.
The ceremony will be followed by the WEGA Champions in March 2020 and the QATAR Esports WEGA Global Games and Global Games Great Final in December 2020.
PWL’s Creative Director Luc Peumans was excited to be part of an all-Belgium technical design and Imagineering team including OC technical director Ludo Vanstreels from Trimex with whom PWL has also worked on several previous projects.
Peumans’ design was based around seven 16-metre-high towers, three upstage and four downstage to the sides to provide a sense of depth and a basic structural framework around the 80-meter-wide oval-shaped performance space. These towers also served as useful lighting positions.
Upstage comprised a 1000-plus-square-metre, 12-metre-high back video wall. The stage surface was mapped for projections and the holographic images were beamed onto massive special holo-scrims.
Peumans chose 100 Robe MegaPointes as his main effects lighting fixtures. These were distributed on different levels of all seven towers, as well as along the top edge of the video wall at the back and scattered on the stage deck to work with the combination of VR and cast.
In addition to the MegaPointes, there were 60 Robe Spiider LED wash beams, 36 Cyclops LED washes, 50 Claypaky Mythos and 42 CP Scenius Unicos which were used to highlight cast positions from the sides and for illuminating specific parts of the projection areas.
Claypaky Stormy LED strobes plus beam lights and a variety of other available fixtures all added up to over 500 light sources.
Commenting on the elaborate layouts, Ludo said: “Luc and I have known each other and worked together for over 25 years, and this synergy and understanding was a huge asset on this project due to the very short notice. It was great working with Luc and his colleagues again on this challenging time-pressured event.”
Peumans remarked: “Having all these resources to hand plus everyone’s talent, experience, vision and passion onboard helped enormously in pulling a complex and high profile show together under a lot of pressure.”
The ticketed opening ceremony launched this first edition of The Global Games, hosted by Aspire Zone Foundation and organised by Truxtun Capital, a multi-game competition featuring CSGO, DOTA2, Street Fighter V, and the eFootball PES series.
