The 2005 ITA Awards - Indian Television Academy Awards,  the country’s most prestigious honors ceremony, were held at Bhavans Ground in Mumbai. The event featured a spectacular lighting design by India’s best known show designer, Atul Sonpal, utilising Robe Show Lighting moving lights.

It was attended by a host of top Bollywood and Indian TV celebrities, some of whom also performed, and the show was also broadcast live on TV for  India’s number one Channel, “Star Plus”.

Sonpal has designed all the major awards ceremonies in India for the last 4 years, and so he was natural choice to be the creative mastermind of this one. All lighting equipment was supplied by his busy rental company, Mumbai-based Jagmag Electric.

Sonpal’s starting point for the lighting was the spectacular wide set designed by Mr. Kunal for Kosmos India consisting of a spherical central feature and a series of cone shaped pyramids flaking both sides of the stage, used for stage entry and exit points.

To match the set, he wanted the lighting to look very ‘televisual’. The rig was configured across three trusses, and utilised 12 Robe ColorSpot 1200 ATs and 20 Robe Scan 1200 XTs to make it rock …. In addition to a large generic rig.

The ColorSpots were rigged vertically on the floor and on the front truss, six of the Robe Scan 1200 XTs were positioned either side of the set pyramids, with the other 14 rigged vertically on the centre truss.

Sonpal uses Robe on all his major shows, and he chose them for this one because of their “Good optics, brightness and zoom facilities”. They were the real workhorses of the rig and were used for the show’s many ‘WOW’ moments, whilst the  generics worked in tandem, providing general stage washes and key lighting. He maximized the ColorSpot 1200’s excellent gobo collection for set and stage texturing and numerous projection effects, commenting that he particularly likes the ‘sun man’ ‘space tunnel’ and ‘radial dashes’ gobos.

He also produced some excellent ‘beam technology’ looks – one of his favourite programming tricks, and highly appropriate for large spectacular shows like this. “The ColorSpot 1200 is an awesome fixture for this” he claims.

Sonpal operated the show himself using an Avolites Diamond 4 Vision and a Pearl 2004 console.