Robe RoboSpots in New League for LOL Worlds 2020 Final

Robe RoboSpots in New League for LOL Worlds 2020 Final posted: 31/03/2021

The breakdown of the RoboSpot systems was 16 x Robe BMFL FollowSpot and 21 x BMFL FollowSpot LT (long throw) luminaires, all with integral cameras, together with 37 active base stations, each linked to the individual lights.

League of Legends' World Championship 2020 Finals was staged at the new Pudong Football Stadium in Shanghai, China, a high-profile, hi-energy event notable for many things, which - in addition to being an eSports calendar highlight - included a spectacular production lighting design by Mat Stovall of LampedUp and his team who helped produce dazzling opening and closing ceremonies plus seat-edge atmospheric engineering, boosting the buzz, thrills and spills of the gaming action. Thirty-seven Robe RoboSpot systems were part of a large lighting rig for the event, specified by Mat and associate LD Trevor Stirlin Burk of Visual Noise Creative, and supplied by Christie Lites out of their UK and US bases to the event's main technical contractor, Creative Technology (CT) Shanghai.

Robert Roth coordinated for Christie Lites, working closely with the CT Shanghai team headed by Aaron Ross Durdin, Sam Tibble and Daniel Sun. Mat wanted RoboSpots on the event for several reasons. He needed a quality white light source to key talent for the opening and closing shows and during the gaming action, with capacity to cover specific choreographed aspects, plus coach and team moments' throughout the tournament.

With a massive performance area to cover in the center of the stadium, Mat was not sure that it would be possible to physically get operators into all the required locations, so RoboSpot was his go-to solution.

The 37 x Robe BMFL moving light units were positioned everywhere - on the downstage trusses, above and below the two giant LED screens onstage that flanked a huge central scenic Paifang arch, and on top of this elegant 33-meter-high centerpiece of Joe Kale's impressive scenic design which was based on the overall show creatively developed by Riot Games' producers with Possible (Michael Figge).

The breakdown of the RoboSpot systems was 16 x Robe BMFL FollowSpot and 21 x BMFL FollowSpot LT (long throw) luminaires, all with integral cameras, together with 37 active base stations, each linked to the individual lights.

They were operated by 14 people, sometimes jumping between different systems depending on which section of the show was playing out at the time. Most operators had not used a RoboSpot before, but they all picked it up quickly and efficiently.

The most experienced operators stayed on all the hero' action downstage, while others were covering the back lights and some of the more creative angles.

The massive task of coordinating this with a mostly non-English speaking crew was relished by Zach Matusow from the international team, who is highly experienced in the field. He also called all the spot cues working closely with CT Shanghai's crew who helped with the translating and ran some of the RoboSpot units.

The operators were corralled in a conference room underneath one of the main grandstands, with no windows or line-of-sight to the stage. They did however have multiple monitors showing broadcast camera feeds giving them eyes on the action independently to what was showing on their own separate RoboSpot BaseStation screens.

By far the most challenging element of installing a RoboSpot system of this magnitude was engineering the control, a task tackled by network architect Tom Buddingh, also part of Mat's core international crew who were coordinated by production LX Jason Mack.

He utilized a design he had previously successfully used on smaller RoboSpot systems which involved managed gigabit switches, fiber-optic cables, and Luminex DMX nodes.

Being out of the country during a pandemic and not in a position to build a mockup system in advance to verify that the plan would work was galvanizing, even though he was confident that with the caliber of the team working on this, everything would be sortable!

The RoboSpot control network consisted of 17 x Gigabit fiber optic switches and 15 Luminex DMX8 Mk2 nodes, which were essential to act as bridges and transport the RDM communication needed to link the RoboSpot controller and the moving head with the attached camera.

Tom configured the follow spot network to have 40 x VLAN's (Virtual Area Networks) essentially running 40 different networks over a single piece of fiber or copper wire which allowed each camera to have its own network link back to the controller, with the operator only able to see a single camera on each controller.

This eradicated the chance of a RoboSpot controller viewing a camera that it was not controlling!

In the control room with all the RoboSpot BaseStations were six managed switches, 4 x 24 port non-managed gigabit switches, and six Luminex Nodes which enabled each controller to have a discrete feed from the appropriate camera, RDM communication to the appropriate head, and receive signal from the lighting console parameters

Tom also designed the main MA-net / sACN show lighting network to control the approximately 3500 fixtures on the main production lighting rig, kept as a completely separate network to reduce traffic on the RoboSpot network.

To easily accomplish this, he took a hard DMX feed from a node attached to the Lighting Network into a node connected to the Spot network, reducing the hundreds of sACN universes to just five.

With the RoboSpot heads so spread out across the rig and the 100-meter limitation of copper ethernet cables, Tom needed a way to distribute the control throughout the venue.

I implemented a hybrid trunk / spider network topology with a couple of main hubs splitting off to distribution points on trusses which accommodat

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