For Mexican lighting designer Pablo Gutierrez, the lighting for this year's event was the latest highlight of his 20-year career in show lighting.
MA Lighting
The Viña del Mar International Song Festival, the largest and oldest music festival in Latin America, was held for six days in February this year with the help of MA Lighting's advanced grandMA3 lighting control platform.
Founded in 1960, this major annual event is now held at the city's 15,000-seat Quinta Vergara Amphitheater and is broadcast on television and streaming to an estimated global audience of 250 million.
For prominent Mexican lighting designer Pablo Gutierrez, the lighting for this year's event was the final highlight of his 20-year career in show lighting. During that time, she has worked with many of Latin music's biggest stars of all genres, and lit shows for theater, musicals, fashion, exhibitions, and more. In 2013, together with production director Soho Ávila, Gutierrez co-founded LEC Live Entertainment Crew, a company specializing in bringing productions to life from conception to execution, including set design, previsualization, and team coordination. This year, Gutierrez and LEC had the incredible experience of designing the lighting for this renowned festival.
grandMA3: "a natural decision"
Gutierrez has long known about MA's control tools. In its early years, with few models available in Mexico, it met the first generation of grandMA, mainly in the United States. The grandMA2 (released in 2008) became widespread and soon became his console of choice. Since 2020, he and his team have been exploring grandMA3's powerful new features. It has been a gradual transition, which led to its use for the first time at the Viña del Mar Festival.
He admits that the transition has had its challenges. "On the one hand," he says, "grandMA2 is the best lighting platform to date – we know it inside out and can program it with ease. Leaving behind has not been easy. On the other hand, there is excitement for the future with grandMA3, to learn its new functions and to explore all the possibilities it offers for the design and programming of shows."
The decision to use grandMA3 for the festival came after LEC's conversations with the festival's technical director, Jaime Laval. Gutierrez recalls, "We talked about how the festival, throughout its history, has always been at the forefront of innovation, constantly incorporating the latest and greatest technologies in all areas: broadcasting, video, sound, staging and more.
In terms of lighting, grandMA3 stood out as the most advanced control software available. Given the festival's commitment to cutting-edge technology, switching to grandMA3 was a natural decision." Time-saving tools.
The outstanding features of grandMA3 have been a great help. "The new Phaser system offers limitless possibilities to create highly customized, dynamic and fluid effects," he says. "The selection grid really makes it quick to create complex and precise effects every time."
He continues: "The console's user interface and workflow are exceptional: very intuitive and incredibly customizable. The touchscreen system works flawlessly, and I especially love being able to modify the coding bars and create multiple presets for them.
"Personally, I use a lot of special color presets, such as gradients, so the 'Magic' feature is one of my favorites. Dynamic preset functions allow for faster programming, and MATricks' expanded options provide even more advanced control."
Gutierrez also praises the significant improvements to the timecode editor, "with features like sound integration and pre-roll/after-roll options, which are extremely useful." He adds: "Another of my favourite features is the ability to import and export presets per luminaire. These are just a few of the key features we use the most during programming, but grandMA3 offers a host of new tools that vastly improve efficiency and creativity."
The beauty of teamwork
Of course, seamless teamwork is essential to the busy operation of LEC, and Gutierrez finds the grandMA3 platform to be the perfect solution for his team's complex tasks. In Viña del Mar were the production manager Soho Ávila, the director of lighting for television Juan Carlos Zamudio, the lighting integrator and room manager Nesmar Estiven Cepeda Medina, the lighting programmer Luciano Marcos and Gutiérrez himself as lighting director. All had personalized access to the grandMA3 network.
While Gutierrez led the project and designed the lighting for the entire event, Avila's role included managing and distributing all essential material (lighting plans, show archives, and MVR), as well as coordinating schedules and calendars. Zamudio, responsible for the live broadcast of the show, used a full-size grandMA3 console for precise control of the contest performances and guests, while ensuring seamless integration with the overall lighting design.
Medina, in charge of network integration and management, oversaw a complex configuration of six grandMA3 consoles at FOH. Their duties included managing the entire workflow of MA-Net3 sessions, configuring connectivity,
Distributing universes in nine grandMA3 processing units and optimizing the use of fiber and network switches.
Marcos, on the other hand, created the presentation files for the guest designers and supervised Depence's visualization file to ensure that the preview work matched the actual execution. He also supported the guest lighting designers in the preview room, ensuring a smooth transition to the stage.
All this was supported by the team at LEC headquarters, which worked in parallel with the production in Mexico. Among them were Nadia Luna, Javier Nava, and Miguel Mendoza, who were responsible for updating the Vectorworks and Depence files, creating lighting graphics, and refining the MVR files to ensure that all technical documentation was up to date.
The entire network used the grandMA3 software version 2.1.1.5, and the lighting provider of the festival was Iluminación Chile. Invaluable Support
"One of the most admirable qualities of MA Lighting," says Gutierrez, "not only as lighting control and scheduling software, but as a company, is its unmatched support. Compared to any other software, not just in the lighting industry, MA's commitment to supporting its users is truly exceptional."
He praises the "incredible support" of Wholestage, MA Lighting's distributor in Mexico, and Chilean distributor MMT. "Their help has been invaluable whenever we have needed it," he says. "MA is always in contact with the Latin market and in constant communication. For this edition of Viña del Mar, their support, both remotely from Germany and in person at the festival, was simply indispensable. We are extremely grateful for their dedication and assistance."
