When Lighting and Stage Designer Steve Wary was charged with creating the look for the opening ceremony of the Saudi Games 2024, he chose 50 Claypaky Skylos fixtures to help the event get off to a dynamic start. Held October 3-17, the Saudi Games were the third edition of the largest national sporting event staged annually in the Kingdom. More than 9,000 male and female athletes competed in 52 sports.

The opening ceremony took place not in a traditional stadium but in the existing Boulevard City area of Riyadh, where all the infrastructure needed to be built, created and organized. The location presented a great opportunity to use the LED screens already present on the buildings, which served as the backdrop for a centrally positioned stage big enough to host the impressive parade of athletes captured for broadcast by two drones. The games’ symbolic flame needed to be a key feature of the design, and Wary had to create a lighting device that could add depth and substance to the production without obstructing the LED screens.

To achieve all this, he designed a stage consisting of two overlapping rings, 36 x 18 meters in diameter, with a slope of 7°. At the top center of the stage he integrated the flame’s cauldron along with a flat area for speeches and the ceremonial portion of the event. Wary distributed the lighting across four levels at stage height, including laser beams on the floor, eight rounded towers for beams and back spots and three more towers behind the stands for FOH spotlights and 24 Claypaky B-EYE K20 washes. He mounted 50 Skylos on the rooftops in the background of the show.

“The Skylos created beams of light in the Riyadh sky, which is very favourable for this purpose since there’s haze all year round that creates a nice mist,” noted Wary. “The B-EYE K20 washes on the main FOH tower helped create an even area to emphasize the FOH up close. They proved their worth since we needed a powerful light output and a good beam angle to assist the FOH projectors in areas we couldn’t reach.”

The Saudi Games marked the first time that Wary used Skylos, which he called, “the ideal choice for this kind of large-scale show – the perfect product. They are made for outdoor use, and I knew they would withstand the high temperatures of this country during full sun. I must admit that, despite the lens treatment and their ability to endure extreme temperatures, we still planned a head-down position in the console to protect the lenses during the day.”

To create large beams in the sky he mounted the Skylos atop rooftops, giving texture to the Riyadh sky. “The power of Skylos quickly got everyone on the same wavelength, and there were exclamations of ‘wow!’ everywhere as I turned them on and people looked up,” he reported. “Besides the powerful and clean beam, Skylos offered other major advantages. First, there were excellent color choices on the color wheel, making it clear that each color was chosen to lose the least possible power in light output, particularly the amber colors that are generally hard to bring out in a large beam – on Skylos these colours were impressive.

“Another pleasant surprise came from the prism. It was also designed to lose minimal light output once it entered the beam, allowing me to magically texture the sky with the prisms and add another dimension to a simple beam. Finally, an additional pleasant surprise came at one point in the show when I needed to create a counter-catch on a small auxiliary stage for a ceremony. When I opened the Skylos zoom and used the frost, it worked really well! Who would have thought we could use the laser beams for the counter or even for the FOH for broadcast!”

Wary found Skylos to be “very reliable machines. We didn’t have a single failure once the kit was up and running, and Claypaky support was very responsive and efficient when they helped us solve an early issue.”

LAB2580 handled the show production with the lighting provided by LabLive/SLS Production. Jean-Yves Orcel was the Lighting Director. The Lighting Operators were Steve Wary and Jerome Claude.

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