Week 2: It's Alive

The above image was captured at about 10pm on Wednesday night, as a screenshot from the Riot Games League of Legends Season 2 World Playoffs livestream (hence the own3Dtv watermark and the low picture quality).  This is inside the Galen Center basketball stadium at USC.  Over the course of the last several days, they have been building this rig, and as is obvious by the piles of equipment, they were still building it when I took this picture.  This is where pare of the title comes from: over the course of the night, more parts of the stage were slowly being assembled.  The entire construct will actually be used for a single, six-hour event on Saturday night, the League of Legends Season 2 World Championship, a single Best of 5 match between the two teams that emerged from the semifinals on Wednesday night, a few hours after I got this screenshot.  Backstory aside, the thing that made me think of the title "It's Alive" was those two glowing orange honeycombs at the top.  My hunch is that they were covered in small moving head LED fixtures, because watching the video footage it looked almost as if they had suspended two panels of lava from the celing.  It was this strange fluctuating orange-black movement that hopefully I will be able to get a picture of on Saturday night when I'll be there in person.

Other things I noticed in this picture include the lone spotlight shining down on the basket lift in the foreground.  While this was probably just a fluke, in this context it showcases once again what they were really doing there, namely construction.  The cool white around the lift makes it really stand out from the hot orange that bathes the entire rest of the scene.  On the point of the hot orange thought, the individual fixtures give very visible points of light, as if they are looking down on the scene, while the entire rest of the scene is in very low light.  To me, these are the sorts of conditions I'm used to working in, and in fact the conditions my mind connects with this sort of working.

I am still somewhat at a loss for words at how to describe what I see in this image.  All of my lighting knowledge to this point has been technical; hardware and how it works.  I have almost no perception of feelings or meanings behind the lights; I know the how but not the why.

I could double the length of this by going into last weekend, which contained the group stage and quarterfinals of the Season 2 World Playoffs, and had a similar lighting rig to this, but that might be a little overboard and would result in me writing myself into a corner again, and making a fool out of myself again.

Final thoughts:  1. Yes, I'm a gamer, and this serves both my game and my work in one massive event.  2. I still have no idea what I'm doing.

-AH