The STLD at Strictly Come Dancing

The STLD at ‘Strictly Come Dancing’ is back! Not surprisingly this award-winning corner stone of the BBC autumn schedules attracts large numbers of students wanting to see how it is made and to meet the team that make such a dazzling variety of lighting looks every week up to Christmas. For reasons we know all too well the last ‘Strictly’ meeting was in 2019, but at last in 2022 we were back, and were delighted to meet so many students as well as a few of our regular members.

Lighting Designer David Bishop took over ‘Strictly’ in 2019 after being the programmer for many years before, putting him in the ideal place to move the design forward, but how do you improve a show that everyone knows and loves? Needless to say David had views.

David started the meeting by introducing his team, starting with Darren Lovell who had been a programmer on ‘Strictly’ for all but two of the nineteen years ‘Strictly’ has been made. Next (in no particular order, as they say) is Tom Young, a programmer who has been making waves in recent years showing remarkable creativity in the light entertainment world. Tom has experience working on live events including arena tours, theatrical productions as well as the biggest of TV shows. David’s third programmer is Matt Lee, who is the graphic content programmer. This post is one of the changes that David introduced, he used to programme all the intelligent lighting as well as driving the Hippotizer servers feeding the screens and projectors. But over time the number of lights had increased and the use of graphics become more complex, as well as the use of the screens expanding to all around the studio. His work-load had become unreasonable, and the addition of the third programmer not only eased this, it allowed the graphic programming to advance.

So to explain the roles, Tom has all the flashy colourful

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lighting that creates the excitement and the moods, Darren has all the face lighting including the follow spots, and Matt delivers all the graphics to the screens. David talked about the 800 or so fixtures now in use on the show, which include about 70 of his favourite work-horse fixtures the Robe MegaPointe which make the signature beams looks. His other favourite fixture is the Clay Paky B-Eye K15, and also Ayrton Mistrals – picked particularly for their size and shape as they do the beams from around the dance floor and so are in shot much of the time. One of David’s goals has been to try to make all fixtures colour-mixing to make it easier to match colour palettes across fixtures and apart from a few legacy units he has now achieved this. New in the rig are some Robe Fortes, in particular for key light positions. A collection of Mac Aura XBs around the dance floor are used during group numbers when there are too many people on the floor to light using the follow spots.

A number of Mac Vipers light the set, and another new feature this year was the Robe Tetra2 linear bars replacing the GLP X bars provided by the previous supplier. The list goes on and on, but as David explained, the cameras look in all directions – through 360° including up to the grid, where a set of 2 cell lights help to create a ceiling.

There are also a lot of LED products – all provided by Light Initiative – lining the set pieces and balconies, a huge 4km in total. David has managed to get most of it to be Ivy Intelligent LED strip, all adding to the depth of the effects offered. So all of these effects lights are on one desk run by Tom Young.

The art of making faces looking good is at the heart of all TV lighting, and Darren Lovell looks after that from his desk, balancing the fourteen follow spots to allow for the changes of relative distance of the spots to the dancers as they move around the floor. Keying of special fixed positions such as judges chat and interview set-ups are mostly moving lights now but still balanced by Darren. There are often moments when one of Darren’s face lights is in the ideal place for Tom to light the set, and the MA3 control system allows different operators to access the same lights, blurring the edges of who controls which lights still further! The upstairs chat area used to be lit with a series of small fresnels, but as the placing of presenters and guests started to wander it became easier to use just soft lights. And not just easier, presenters Tess Daly and Claudia Winkleman have commented that they look better there than the other areas – well everyone does in soft light!

One of David’s goals when he took over the lighting for ‘Strictly’ was to go more theatrical. A hall-mark of the show has always been good face lighting, but he wanted to go a step further, introducing more colour and shape into the performances. The way he sees it is that the interviews and judges moments need to be as if they are from a glossy magazine with key lights over the cameras, but the performances are pieces of theatre, and David tries to keep appropriate balances on faces even when the Steadicam roves through 360° around the dancers, always keeping the key light angles away from the camera lines. He uses Robert Juliat Alex spots in what might be considered the Front of House position, with four RJ Gingers in the corners for the dances. Back spotting is with RoboSpots, and David hopes to change the Gingers to RoboSpots next year.

The stage is in effect a thrust stage with audience either side making normal cross light impossible, but that is where the floor lights come into play.

The third operator is Matt Lee who controls the graphic content for the collection of screens. The graphic content is provided by Potion Pictures, largely with discussion with the production creatives. The content design might arrive designed to work to timecode, or even a collection of elements to be programmed to the performance. In its simplest form the video programming is just delivering the right graphic to the right screens at the right time, but it can quickly develop into manipulating and re-colouring as the design for each performance develops. On-site graphics designers can modify as they go along too, and they simply reload the new content to the server.

The two MA3s and Matt’s Hog 4 are in the lighting gallery, a Portakabin outside which a legacy from the Covid days. When the pandemic hit, it was necessary to create more space so that the team could stay together in an environment which allowed them to communicate freely, whilst preserving the distancing required. The cabin and its layout has been such a success that BBC Studioworks has now purchased the cabin and it is used for every show at GL2. For those who like statistics the MA has 41,000 parameters over about 100 universes, and Tom’s desk also drives about 4km of LED strip, much of this is now Ivy Intelligent tape. One of the tricks used to get the variety of looks this show needs is to turn off the LED strip that lines the iconic curves of the set occasionally, and to help with the contrast there is now a new material in front of the LED strip, called ‘Secret Sign’ designed to look black under ambient light.

A recent and significant change David introduced in 2020 is to set the camera colour balance from tungsten to a cooler colour, so improving the camera response to the different light sources and their colour ranges, in particular to allow better colour rendition in the blue spectrum of the Megapointe. As a discharge source fixture, a cooler lineup allows for more differentiation between blues, cyans, purples and pinks

David went through the weekly schedule, which usually starts on a Thursday, although unusually this week it had moved forward a day to fit with World Cup broadcasts. On this first studio day the crew set up any specials for that week, while Tom gets tracks for each performance striped with time-code which he used to build looks based on the style document provided by production. By the end of that day they have working versions of each sequence. Day two each couple get 20 minutes each to rehearse on the dance floor during which they perform their routine 3 times. The team then block through all the presenter sequences.

That takes them to Saturday, when each couple have a further ten minutes (two runs of their routine) each, followed by the dress rehearsal. The studio then rehearses the guest act music performance, refreshes the opening sequence with the presenters and then goes live to air. After the show and a short break they all return to record the results show for transmission the next day.

The graphics used for ‘Strictly’ have become a very significant part of the look of the show over the years, and David explained that the floor was achieved using six 20k projectors. The trick to keeping the projection looking good on camera was to keep as much light off the floor as possible. Key lights where needed, particularly for special 3D or perspective floor projections are floor mounted Diablo profiles that cut right off the floor, and larger numbers make use of the line of floor washes either side of the dance floor. Follow spots have to keep irising down to avoid their spill becoming too large, while the graphics programmer sets a mask for any static positions to keep the projection off the dancers’ faces. On occasions the black dot used as a mask was instead used to become a white dot, to become a lighting source for a bit of backlight, or top light, particularly for props and scenic items.

A new feature that has appeared in the last few years is the use of Augmented Reality graphics, where 3-D imagery is synchronised to just a few cameras giving the viewer at home some stunning visual effects. Sensors on the cameras tell the graphics server where as well as what they are looking at by detecting markers in the studio grid, and together with feedback from the zoom and focus controls they get the graphics to fit, move and react with the shots. David found that what made this work best was to match the lighting to the graphics as well as the graphics to the lighting, so blurring the lines between reality and graphics further. Some spectacular results have been achieved, notably a snow dome scene, and a dance that started and finished on top of a very high building. There is no doubt that this clever innovation works better with some designs than other – David recalled an elephant that appeared once, and clever that it was it was never going to look real. The more abstract designs generally work better, but the key has certainly been to work with the designer to light the digital items as if they were actually in the studio within the graphics, and to light the real items so they share the same quality as the virtual ones.

The show returned to Blackpool this year, for the first time since Covid. The dancers love this outing to what they see as a landmark of the dancing world, but of course it is a lot of work for the technical departments. The floor in Blackpool Tower Ballroom is not great for projection, and rather than try they instead dress the floor with 12 Robe Fortes fitted with custom gobos.

The students were invited to ask questions, and here is a selection.

Q. Do you use pre-visualisation?

A. David uses Wysiwyg for drawing his plot. There is no time in the schedule for previsualization and of course they get a day in the studio to work on looks before the camera rehearsal anyway. Tom has an issue with Wysiwyg pre-visualisation in that you can’t set the colour point for your camera settings and so the colours are not accurate. When he needs to Tom uses dummy palettes for pre-programming then transfers to the real palettes for the show to get around this, but not on ‘Strictly’.

Q. Do you ever use lasers?

A. Very rarely! The safety considerations with the BBC are quite a limitation. Also to look good they really need a lot of haze, and this can be a problem in a live show as you don’t want it all the time.

Q. Favourite fixture?

A. Maybe the MegaPointes and the B-Eyes

Q. How long is the studio build time?

A. The build time is about three weeks, largely because the set is such a big build including balconies and a sprung dance floor. Lighting is rigged on trusses and hung from the studio beams, then after the build the only access is by cherry-pickers.

Q. How much do you use the mirror ball?

A. Not as much as we used to. It gets used for the last dance, with its effect enhanced by graphics, but otherwise maybe every other week.

Q. Do you remember any very tricky performances?

A. In Musicals week there was an eight minute medley that was packed with lighting cues, and two hours is just not enough. It also featured a large yellow set piece that they had to keep hidden till an appropriate moment!

There was one dance with John and Johannes which featured so many drapes all the usual lighting was masked. David realised the only set of follow spots which would work were not at all in an ideal position conventionally, but decided to try it. As it turned out, the effect was stunning and to this day we often deploy what they now call the “John & Johannes spots” configuration.

Once in a while they get to the run on the Friday and decide they hate what they have done for a performance, and just have to start again. Luckily this does not happen often, but it does happen.

Q. How did it feel going from programmer to LD?

A. I found there was far more work outside the show days, with all the meetings and phone calls. For the first time it felt like a grown-up job and I spent a lot of time building my team and my relationship with them. You have to learn to handle the pressure, and although programmers have pressure too, they are more focused in the moment whereas as an LD you have to keep thinking ahead, often juggling between other shows at the same time.

The contract to supply the lighting is now with Version2 who have recently taken on Simon Perrott and all the equipment he had with Finelight, the main equipment supplier in the past, and we thank Nick Edwards of Version2 for sponsoring the meeting.

The meeting attracted close to 100 guests, mostly students, and as a healthy sign of the times the gender split was more or less 50:50.

We also thank David Bishop, Gaffer Mark Newell, Head of Technology Richard Shout, and the three programmers – Darren Lovell, Matt Lee, and Tom Young for giving up their time to let this meeting take place.