It’s all about high stakes, bright lights, and big money at the Poker Dome Challenge in Sin City: a 43-week series of speed-poker totirnaments with a grand prize of $1 million airing Sunday nights on the Fox Sports Network (FSN). Sponsored by MansionPoker net, the series is produced and broadcast in the Neonopolis Complex, a large dome on historic Fremont Street specially constructed by FSN.
Poker Dome follows a speed-poker format–like poker on an NBA shot clock–with approximately 80 to 100 hands played per hour as opposed to the normal 12 to 15. The final will be broadcast live this spring for a winner-takes-all $1 million prize.
The Dome sees participants competing at a table enclosed in glass. Fans seated around the Dome are able to watch the poker proceedings unfold without being seen or heard while the players’ reactions, images, heart rates, and hole cards are displayed on individual plasmas and large video screens. Special cameras were installed to capture the hole cards, and cards were even fitted with RFID chips so the audience can see which cards are in play or discarded.
In the past, most poker shows were lit and shot like a sporting event, but Poker Dome is treated more like a game show or sports entertainment. The lighting cues use colors to create starker looks as the game proceeds into higher rounds. Lighting design is by Bruce Ferri with associate lighting design by Ben Carlson, both of New York City Lites, while Tim Saunders of Broadcast Design International Inc. handled scenic design.
The overall design is centered on supporting the intensity of playing poker in an arena atmosphere. The greatest challenge was to prevent illegal play by not allowing the players to see the audience. The players are separated from the audience by a glass wall that has been treated with a graphic-type material called Clear Vision. When lit from the players’ side, it turns opaque and prevents the players from seeing the audience.
Ferri uses Martin MAC 700 Profiles, Vari-Lite VL500Ds, MAC 250 Entours, MX-10 scanners, and digital effects from Maxedia Digital Media Composers in his design. Pix-elRange PixelArc Cs, various Pixel-Range PixelBricks, Ocean Optics SeaChanger units, and Morpheus M ColorFaders add to the color of the set, while Element Labs Versa(R) Tubes and accompanying Versa Drive D2 and C1 controllers handle more video effects from the server. Control is via MA lighting grandMA and grandMA Light consoles. Adding to this are a variety of ETC Source Four ellipsoidals and PARs, with dimming via ETC Sensor 48 and Sensor 24 dimmer racks, along with TMBs ProPower 48 Channel 208/110 Distro for power management. Look Solutions Unique 2 Hazers provide beam definition. CYM Lighting Services (account manager Kevin Swank) provides the lighting, and SoCal Scenic Inc. provides scenic services.
“We were going for an effect to create multiple ever-changing backgrounds that could be used to not only enhance the look of the set, but also be able to accent certain parts of the show, giving it a more dramatic look,” explains Justin Garrone, associate art director from Show Partners, which handles art direction, engineering, and operations for the show. “Our canvas for this was a semi-circular array of Versa Tubes that was used as the players’ background.” Chris Runnells is the show’s art director.
Most of the moving lights are placed in the grid above the poker table in a semi-circular configuration, providing lighting support for the game using the red-carpet floor as a eye with card suit patterns. The NIX-10s are placed on dead hung pipes in the audience area and used to light the audience during game play.
Above the Versa Tube wall is a semi-circular bank of 12 42″ Samsung HD Plasma monitors to project graphics. In the audience are two flown banks, each with six 46″ Samsung 460P LCD monitors. “We have a bank house left and right,” says Garrone. “These are used to display hold cards, heart monitors, and placings in the game.”
Also in the audience section a Barco SLM R9+ Performer DLP projects onto a DaLite Screen flown house center above the glass wall. “This is to show the audience how the show is being cut by the director and how it will air on the network,” Garrone adds.
Additional crew includes assistant LD Stephen Bourmetis; lighting director/programmer Mike Appel; programmers Mark Butts, Demfis Fyssicopulos, and Andrew Giffen; Maxedia programmer Curtis Cox; lighting crew chief John Lotz; master electrician Stephanie Weiss; and board op Paul Fickett.
ADDED MATERIAL
Poker Dome Challenge is played at the Neonopolis Complex on historic Fremont Street in Las Vegas.
Lighting design for Poker Dome is by Bruce Ferri with associate Ben Carlson, while Tim Saunders handled scenic design.

Five questions for Kevin Adams, Lighting Designer

1. Your lighting for Spring Awakening has been described as “an arresting mix of hanging bulbs, shafts of light, and arrays of neon tubing in the set and around the theatre.” Can you describe your concept for this production and the challenges of creating different lighting styles for each act?
Spring Awakening contains two separate narratives: the 19th-century play (the book scenes) and the 21st-century concert (the songs). I imagined that the book scenes, which are the real space of the characters, should look like a kind of contemporary presentation of a small classics play. I wanted the hardness of white work light to contrast with the earnestness of the language and the open youthful performances. I wanted the book scenes to look simple and un-detailed, and to be free of lighting that creates an illusion of place–more like a workspace than the real place where the scenes take place. I also wanted the rules to shift and become more complicated as the show progresses. The show begins simply as the actors enter into the white work light of the preset. A pretty girl in a white slip steps onto a chair, and a silent overture of 100 clear light bulbs pop on to announce the beginning of the show.
The parallel narrative is the contemporary rock/pop songs that express the interior world of the youths. This world is brimming with abstracted environmental details, saturated color, complicated cueing, and muscular lighting. I’ve been using electric objects (various light bulbs, fluorescent fixtures, neon) in my work for many years, and I was interested in framing the musical part of the show with an environment that contained sculptural light objects. Created through a long collaboration with the set designer, Christine Jones, we surround the actors and audience with elegant sculptures made of colored fluorescent tubes, neon lines and circles, and hanging fluorescent blue light bulbs, as well as light boxes and vertically mounted ceiling fixtures. These electric objects–as well as LED strips that illuminate the walls, which are inlaid with miniature deeply saturated audience blinders–are capable of exploding the simple white scene space into a variety of concert spaces that are surrounded by a constellation of brightly colored dots and lines of light that flash and blink like abstracted signs and signals.
The two parallel narratives run separately–one often contrasting the other’s rules–until deep into Act II, as the narrative turns to montage and real space overlaps with interior space, and they intertwine and eventually become a single visual narrative.
2. What is the best career advice you’ve ever been given?
I was never really interested in a “career,” so I never really asked for career advice. I realized early on that employment as a freelancer was always going to be up and down, so I’ve tried to make every day less about working and more about making things that, at the end of the day, satisfy me. And if other people respond to the work I make, then great.
3. And what’s the worst?
Probably telling myself that a “career” doesn’t matter.
4. What idea of yours looked good on paper but did not pan out in reality?
There are a few ideas in every show I design that don’t look the way I saw them in my mind’s eye, but once I start putting the show together with my collaborators, there are also little accidents that occur that can be developed into larger ideas. The trick is staying open to the accidental.

5. What piece of equipment can you absolutely not do without?

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