WORLD MUSIC AWARDS Montecarlo
A parade of stars in Montecarlo for the annual celebration sponsored by Prince Albert of Monaco. 18 Super Scan Zooms and 6 Clay Paky Shadow QS-LTs were used for the lighting of the show.
“I can clearly state that the artistic cast proposed every year by the “World Music Awards” is unmatched throughout the world!”. These are the words of John Martinotti, executive producer of the show in Monaco which allocates the awards to those artists who have achieved record sales during the music season which has just finished. Even this year the figures speak for themselves: 900 million televiewers were connected in over 100 countries to witness a parade of stars from the world of singers, cinema, fashion and sport. World Music Awards has been held in Monaco for the last ten years, under the High Patronage of Prince Albert of Monaco and is the only European award-giving ceremony which is placed during the evening “prime time” viewing of the American ABC.
Among the stars who presented their multi-millionaire hits, either live or by a video link, we can find Celine Dion, the Spice Girls, U2, Backstreet Boys, Andrea Bocelli, Monica Naranjo, DJ Bobo, Aqua and the beautiful Mariah Carey, crowned “World's Best Selling Recording Artist of the 90s”. Among the guest stars who consigned the prizes directly into the hands of the artists were Mickey Rourke, Angie Everhart, Helena Christiansen, Mike Tyson, Ursula Andress, Steven Seagal and many other stars who fill the front pages of the newspapers every day.
The stage at the Sporting Club in Montecarlo was lit up by 18 Super Scan Zooms mounted on two trusses, one positioned centrally and the other at the back of the stage. They lit up the artist against the lights, emphasising their shows with head-spinning plays on light. The LD Simon Miles explains to us why he chose the Clay Paky Super Scan Zooms: “During evenings like these in front of audiences of VIPs and tens of millions of spectators, it is fundamental that everything goes off perfectly. Clay Paky products have always offered high performance and, above all, the maximum in reliability. I think that Clay Paky is an unavoidable choice if you want to have professional lighting of the highest level.” Simon Miles used the lighting with his usual mastery, managing to create different plays on light for each single artist, depending on the musical language they proposed, thanks to the vast range of effects offered by the Super Scan Zoom, among which is the gobo system which is made up of two independent wheels (one of which has 4 gobos which each rotate individually), two rotating prisms which can be combined with the gobos and a colour mixing system which can produce infinite chromatic tonalities.
“I created a warm and seductive background for Mariah Carey's, Monica Naranjo's and Luis Miguel's interpretations, while for Aqua, Tic Tac Toe and DJ Bobo I concentrated more on discotheque effects. I varied the background colours a lot to characterise each artist's show and to make the stage design stand out better.” Simon Miles also chose the Super Scan Zooms because they have a group of “zooms”, made up of a set of mobile lenses so that the aperture of the light beam can be varied with a continuity from 8 to 16 degrees, keeping it perfectly uniform at the same time. This characteristic is fundamental in theatres and in all those professional show business places where accurate projection with the scanner at any aperture is required.
6 Shadow QS Long Throws were also present in the Sporting Club room, grouped in three different positions with two in each, so that the artists on the stage could be reached from any angle. Of course, the lighting requirements in the room had to be coupled with the television shot requirements. “During the presentation of the Awards I released all the power of the Shadows and the other lights I had available onto the stage, so that every single centimetre was lit up. The prize-giving moment is always of extreme importance and I wanted the faces of the artists to be perfectly lit up, so that the close-ups captured their emotions. During their performances, instead, I could sweep over the space range as I pleased: there were numerous videocameras giving the televiewer the sensation of really being present and these meant that I was not conditioned by the choice of lighting on the stage and the stage design at the back.” The public, whether present in the theatre or watching at home in front of the TV, was involved in a fantastic show where every detail of the stage designs, the costumes, the acoustics and the lighting had been studied in depth, guaranteeing the success of the exhibition.
At the end of the evening Prince Albert went up onto the stage to thank the artists and the organisers of the event, stressing the humanitarian aims. All the takings were in fact handed over to build a hospital in Niger in the name of the late lamented Princess Grace, while all the profits gained from the various sponsorships and from television rights will be given to the hospital which is being built at Mokatam in Egypt. World Music Awards has therefore a concrete commitment towards society, just as has already been demonstrated on other occasions by the show business world. World Music Awards 98 is just over and work has already begun for next year: the organisational machine has already been set in motion, following the tracks of those artists much loved by the public, who will inevitably find themselves on the stage of the Sporting Club in one year's time!