ABC News' "Mission to Mars Live!"
Client
ABC / DISNEY
EVP of Design Dennis Size transformed ABC’s TV-3 Studio into the Red Planet for ABC News’ “Mission to Mars Live!” The special program celebrated the historic landing of NASA’s Perserverance Rover. Perserverance is only the 9th space craft to successfully land on Mars. It will be there for two years to collect samples and search for signs of ancient life.
Team Members
CNN Studio 19Y
Client
CNN / CNNi
CNN’s Studio 19Y at Hudson Yards debuted on May 20, 2019 with New Day. The industrial loft inspired new studio was designed by Jack Morton Worldwide and beautifully lit by Executive Lighting Designer Steve Brill, Senior Lighting Designer Niel Galen, Lighting Designers Dan Rousseau, Fred Uebele, and Lane Sparber, and Systems Designer Richard Hoyes. In addition to New Day, Studio 19Y is home to At This Hour, Quest Means Business, and Cuomo Prime Time. Each designed with their own distinct aesthetic.
The day in Studio 19Y begins at 6am with the flagship 3hour morning show, New Day. New Day first debuted in 2012 in a small “loft” space. The studio in Hudson Yards keeps the spirit of the original space with the brick walls and metal beams but adds higher ceilings and grand windows, actually video walls, that allow for endless possibilities. The bright morning show welcomes viewers to the day and washes the brick in warm white while the metal elements are accented to carefully bring attention, but not to demand it. The show is co-hosted by Alisyn Camerota and John Berman, primarily at the home base desk, but has several standups, demo areas, and cozy seating area for intimate interviews.
In the afternoon, Quest Means Business, hosted by Richard Quest and airing on the sister station CNNi, features the host energetically moving throughout the studio. The set favors warmer tones with cool highlights to accent the architectural features around the studio. The automated lighting fixtures allow for effortless lighting of the multitude of positions used. The color changing LED fixtures abundant throughout the studio enable the show to instantly change a look and feel for individual segments, allowing lighting to help tell the story.
The evening broadcast is Cuomo Prime Time, which flips the studio around physically and drastically alters the color pallet. The lights on the brick walls shift to a dramatic rich blue accented with teal. This allows for skin tones to pop out from the backgrounds. Center to the entire set is the large “Cuomo Prime Time” sign that hangs behind the anchor and is carefully lit with accent lights. Floor pools dot the hardwood floor giving a warm base to the entire room.
LDG’s lighting design for Studio 19Y allows for the studio to be transformed from morning to evening and every inch of it used for unique news broadcasting. Many thanks to the numerous people who made this possible.
Team Members
CNN Studio 19Z
Client
CNN / CNNi
CNN’s Studio 19Z at Hudson Yards debuted on May 13, 2019 with both Erin Burnett Out Front and CNN Tonight with Don Lemon. The crisp and clean new studio was designed by Click Springs and beautifully lit by Executive Lighting Designer Steve Brill, Senior Lighting Designer Niel Galen, Lighting Designer Fred Uebele, and Systems Designer Richard Hoyes.
Studio 19Z is a visually flexible environment home to Erin Burnett Out Front, CNN Tonight with Don Lemon, and Fareed Zakaria GPS each utilizing a different area of the studio. The studio is primarily comprised of LEDs, impeccably lit bright white walls, a steel staircase to a mezzanine level with producer workstations, and bright red CNN accent stripes. The white walls presented a significant challenge for lighting since they needed to be highlighted carefully and evenly to give depth without any distracting reflections.
Nightly broadcasts from Studio 19Z begin with Erin Burnett Out Front who sits in her section of the studio with the largest expanse of LED video wall with a panoramic NYC landscape and a bright white border. Burnett’s unusually shaped desk allows for easy conversations. The clean lines of her desk seamlessly flow into the rest of the studio adding to the clean crisply designed show.
The studio is transformed for CNN Tonight with Don Lemon. Lemon has always had a vibrant set, but now that he has a new studio, his set has matured along with his show. Similar to Burnett, CNN Tonight features white walls with clean lines. Floor pools in a cool color accent the floor and make it pop. In an unusually shaped desk, Lemon is front and center with multiple shots available offering up different backgrounds. His main background features the staircase and mezzanine with an interspersed skyline.
The final and particularly distinct show broadcast from Studio 19Z is Fareed Zakaria GPS, a Sunday program with engaging in-depth conversations on this week’s news on a global scale. Nestled into his own corner of the studio, GPS has a specific look that does not rely on LED video walls for its background. Instead, a blue and white printed world map is hung in sections around the desk. Clusters of white dots indicate the continents and highly populated areas. Vertical white lightboxes are interspersed between sections of map. Above all of this, there is a clearstory with lightboxes divided into sections of 3 that allow for a soft transition of color. The brightly lit Sunday show is shot at an alternative axis and allows for intimate intellectual conversations.
Many thanks to all of the people who worked tirelessly to bring this studio and its three shows to air.
Team Members
CNN Studio 17N
Client
CNN / CNNi
CNN debuted their new headquarters at 30 Hudson Yards in May of 2019. The Lighting Design Group was honored to be invited to design all four large studios, an open-air newsroom studio, a green screen studio, six single camera flash studios, and the multitude of shows consisting of over 15 hours of programming. In addition to broadcast design, the LDG Systems Department designed all power and data management for the studios using an ETC EOS control infrastructure with Paradigm supplements. The design team was led by Executive Lighting Designer Steve Brill, along with Senior Lighting Designer Niel Galen, and Richard Hoyes served as the Systems Designer.
The Newsroom Studio was the first studio premier from the new Hudson Yards headquarters on May 6, 2019 with Early Start hosted by Dave Briggs and Christine Romans. The hosts sit at a large oval anchor glass desk supported by internally lit rectangular metal frames. The desk sits above LED video panels built into the floor and ringed by the classic CNN red border. Behind the anchors are several rows of newsroom workstations with internally lit rectangular shapes, reminiscent of the desk, inserted into the ceiling and a large LED screen in the back of the room. The programming from the open-air studio continues with CNN Newsroom, Reliable Sources, and Weekend Newsroom. As with CNN’s other studios, the Newsroom Studio uses its flexible lighting and graphics displayed in the LED screens to transform the studio for each distinct show. Congratulations to everyone for their hard work on this small but vital studio.
Team Members
CNN Studio 19X
Client
CNN / CNNi
Studio 19X was the final CNN studio to debut from its new location at 30 Hudson Yards. The studio was designed as an adaptable black box space for special broadcasts and creatively lit by Executive Lighting Designer Steve Brill, Senior Lighting Designer Niel Galen, Lighting Designer Dan Rousseau, and Systems Designer Richard Hoyes.
Studio 19X consists of a circular riser with integrated video panels, moveable video wall segments that can be configured in a variety of arrangements, internally lit ceiling elements, a variety of seating options for the host, and the ability to incorporate a live studio audience. The lighting is flexible allowing for multiple configurations of scenery, host, and audience, which enables CNN to produce distinct specials from one central location.
On December 13, 2020 CNN broadcast a special production of their annual event CNN Heroes hosted by Anderson Cooper and Kelly Ripa from Studio 19X. CNN Heroes traditionally takes place in the American Museum of Natural History in New York under the blue whale and celebrates ordinary people who make a difference in their communities. CNN reimagined the event in the midst of the pandemic to focus solely on people and extraordinary acts behind the fight against the coronavirus, the battle for racial equality, and struggle for social justice. Studio 19X provided a space where the event could be produced without an audience and adhere to strict safety protocols.
The set by Clickspring Designs included a circular LED floor display, a glowing runway for the hosts, LED screens, and a cube motif carried over from previous years. A number of the live remote interviews, including one with Dr. Anthony Fauci, were displayed in the cubes. LDG’s lighting design established a space was dark and atmospheric with beams of light and lens flares accenting the studio. The hosts were dramatically illuminated to clearly pick them up from their dark background. Many thanks to the people who worked tirelessly to reimagine and redesign this elegant altruistic broadcast.
Team Members
NBC Meet the Press
Client
NBC
Meet the Press broadcasted from their new studio in the heart of Washington D.C. on January 24, 2021. Senior Designer Niel Galen relit this popular Sunday morning public affairs program which has been on the air for over 70 years.
The redesigned studio combines colonial architecture with a modern twist. A center piece of the studio is a wooden round table with modern red chairs, which can seat up to four people with the moderator Chuck Todd, once social distancing is over. It is enclosed by colonial blue archways and panel walls that can be moved to reveal expansive windows. The table is cleverly lit to be shot in the round without hidden cameras. Todd’s main desk is located in another area of the studio with the newsroom as the background. The colonial style desk is brought into the twenty-first century with LEDs and a warm vibrant red color. Galen’s beautiful lighting design of both of the large studio illuminates the modern and traditional elements providing a clean crisp design. Congratulations to Galen and to all the talented people who worked on this important design.
Team Members
NBC Washington DC Studios
Client
NBC
NBC has officially opened their new Washington DC Bureau and Studios on Capitol Hill. LDG has been a part of the process at every step, providing both lighting system design and broadcast lighting design for more than 5,500 sq ft of studio space & 16,500 sq ft of newsroom and support space. The newly redesigned studios mix the neoclassical and federalist architecture prevalent in DC with touches of modern design. LED elements are integrated into the architecture to help set the mood for each show along with the distinct lighting cues.
Broadcasting from the new studios will be NBC’s Meet the Press and Weekend Today, as well as MSNBC’s The ReidOut with Joy Reid, The Cross Connection with Tiffany Cross, The Sunday Show with Jonathan Capehart and additional Washington programming for both networks. Congratulations to our design teams led by Senior Designer Niel Galen, who traveled over 4,800 Amtrak miles in four years, Richard Hoyes, Mark London and to all the talented people who contributed to the design of these impressive new facilities.
Team Members
NBC Sunday Night Football
Client
NBC Sports
Once again in 2020, Senior Designer Paul Lohr joined the NFL on the road to light Sunday Night Football on NBC. The weekly broadcast took him to stadiums across America, from Foxborough, Massachusetts to Santa Clara, California. Each stadium booth is unique and requires its own lighting design. Some of the challenges he faced included very small booths with architectural elements that had to be worked around and booths with no place to hang lights requiring him to rig positions. Lohr’s design also had to contend with the ambient light that flows through the stadium windows and pollutes the anchors’ positions and the LED wall behind them. Stadium by stadium, Lohr surmounted these challenges to light a clean crisp show in the midst of a pandemic. Photos by Sports Video Group and Paul Lohr.
Team Members
ABC News' 20/20
Client
ABC / Disney
ABC anchors, Amy Robach and David Muir prepare to begin taping the opening of the perennial newsmagazine 20/20 …. now in its 43rd season on ABC. For the first time in almost a year they are back ‘home’ broadcasting from ABC News flagship studio TV-3. Executive Lighting Designer Dennis Size redesigned the show’s lighting alongside Lighting Director Alex Kyle-Dipietropaolo. Thank you to the whole team who worked hard on this stunning redesign of a classic show.
Team Members
ABC News Inauguration of Joe Biden
Client
ABC / Disney
January 20, 2021 Joseph Biden was inaugurated as the 46th President of the United States with Kamala Harris as vice president. Harris is the first woman, first black person, and the first person of South Asian descent to serve the office of vice president. ABC News covered the inauguration from their newly renovated TV3 Studio. Executive Vice President of Design, Dennis Size relit the impressive modern studio in March during the pandemic in time for the Super Tuesday Election Coverage.
