CANADA – Telemiracle, the annual telethon in Saskatchewan, Canada that benefits the Kinsmen Foundation, marked its 41st year with a 21-hour, commercial-free live broadcast from TCU Place, Saskatoon’s Arts & Convention Centre. The show’s Lighting Designer, Slobodan Marin, gave new punch to the telecast with Claypaky Scenius moving head spotlights and Claypaky A.leda B-EYE K10s.
The Kinsmen Foundation is a Canadian non-profit organization that assists Saskatchewan people to acquire special needs equipment and access to medical treatment. Telemiracle alternates between Regina and Saskatoon annually and aired on the province’s CTV affiliates.
This year Slobodan Marin, who has served as Lighting Director for the past four telethons, stepped up to the role of Lighting Designer. The post was held previously by Linus MacDonald, who remained on board as Set Designer.
“Last year Scenius made its debut on Telemiracle, and we wanted to see what else it could do to give the show a nice kick,” says Marin. He mounted six Scenius fixtures on staging pipe to back light a 60 x 30-foot see-thru screen downstage.
“Scenius gave us a totally new look with the screen,” he says. “We’d bring the screen down in front of Scenius to block the set then zoom in and out with certain gobos so the Scenius beam went from 8º to 48º. You’d see the gobos shrink and open up – it looked fantastic. And six fixtures were enough to provide nice coverage from about 30 feet away.”
Marin used the gobo effects with a country band playing in front of the screen and with a child pianist accompanied by a ballet dancer. “We got mountain-style effects for the pianist and dancer with the gobo rotation,” he says. “I really like Scenius – they offer such variety in what you can do, especially when combined with a screen and gobos.”
Deep in the set upstage was a rear projection screen suspended from pipe. Marin put two B-EYE K10s on each bottom corner facing the cameras. “They’re pretty powerful lights and give a great star filter effect,” he notes. “Sometimes I’d do a lens rotation to give a nice chase off the star filter effects around the light – it looked fantastic, especially for a performance of Leonard Cohen’s ‘Hallelujah’ song. We had a nice amber color on them, too.”
Marin says he’s “always happy with Claypaky products. I’m always looking for something new to test, and Claypaky fixtures give me so many opportunities to show what I can do as a Lighting Designer.”
A.C.T Lighting Inc. is the exclusive distributor of Claypaky fixtures in North America.
Francesco Romagnoli, Claypaky Area Manager for North and Latin America, added, “We’re proud to be a part of this project year after year and we congratulate Mr. Marin on his design this year.”