Robe Lights the TPi Awards 2026

	The Robe team also lit the upstairs VIP area. Photo: Marko Polasek

Robe Lighting was the production lighting supplier for the TPi Awards 2026, staged at Evolution in Battersea, London, UK. The awards celebrated its landmark 25th anniversary, organized by TPi magazine, part of Mondiale Technology Media.

Over 300 Robe lighting fixtures were on the lighting rig, designed and curated especially for the room by Robe's in-house creative team led by lighting director Nathan Wan, working closely with associate designer Andy Webb.

The TPi Awards celebrate some of the best creative and technical accomplishments from the past 12 months in entertainment production.

The brief in the main room was a lighting style to impress the nearly 2,000 industry professionals attending. The glittering silver-inspired lighting design used some of Robe's newest technologies and harmonized with video content created by Observatory that appeared on a massive LED screen.

Webb produced the music track in conjunction with the TPi team -- led by TPi magazine's commercial director Fran Begaj -- while Wan and the rest of the team were pre-vizzing the lighting using Capture a week before the event. They were supported by a crew of seven NRG (Next Robe Generation) students picked from four different colleges around the UK.

The large screen filled the full width of the room and wrapped around the edges, suggesting that the guests were immersed in a giant mirror ball. The just-launched GigaPointe, a multifunctional, laser light source unit, was prominent on the rig, especially during the 70-second spectacle that signaled the start of the Awards ceremony. Twenty-three of the units were featured in a letterbox element built into the screen at the back of the stage. Another eight GigaPointes were dotted along the back of the stage and around the sides at floor level; overall, 40 were used.

Seventy SVB1s -- a multisource effect, beam, and wash luminaire -- were dotted around all over the rig. Sixteen were mounted atop the curved screen trusses, accenting their curves.

Thirty-two iESPRITE LTL fixtures were featured on the advanced trusses above the room, for dappling and texturing around the space, together with 40 compact iPAINTE LTM wash beams. Also in the rig were 12 SVOPATTS, adding eye candy and depth to the stage for that iconic retro light curtain look.

Thinking out of the box, the design objective was to show the flexibility of all these Robe fixtures, so 36 WTF! strobe/floods were the main wash lighting fixtures. They also supplied a few retinal surprise moments.

Onstage key lighting for the awards presentations and general front lighting was provided by a combination of seven T1 and T2 Profiles, also rigged on the front trusses.

Prominent on the design were ten iBOLTS in the room, four in the roof trusses, and six on three podiums per side, used for all the effects looks, especially during the timecoded introduction that kicked off the awards presentation segment. They were also used to zap a 2m mirror ball, rigged 20' into the main room.

The iBOLTS were used with ScanGuard, a patented Robe geo-fencing system, incorporating LIDAR technology to scan the surrounding area, identifying and locking out unsafe zones. If an object encroaches within a safe working distance, the system automatically cuts the fixture output to prevent accidents.

Six iFORTE LTX FS followspots, running on six RoboSpot systems, were sited around the room perimeter, used for the presenters and all the award pickups.

The bar centrepiece was an installation featuring 30 mirror balls, hung at different heights and running at different rotational speeds. The balls were well illuminated with a combination of GigaPointes, 16 LEDBeam 350s, and 20 LedPOINTES rigged on a surrounding central box truss.

The Robe team also lit the upstairs VIP area.

For the last few years, the lighting brief has been extended to include the venue's exterior. This year, the installation featured nine iBOLTS, together with dix WTF!s used as asymmetrical floods to light up some parked trucks from ETL Logistics and Trucking By. These fixtures are also IP-rated and wireless.

The main room light show was programmed and controlled via an Avolites D9-215 console, with another for "hot" backup. An Avolites D7-215 was used for the bar area, with another D7-215 for the exterior installation.

The usual challenges applied, with very little time on-site. The load-in commenced on Sunday morning, so they had one night of on-site programming to be ready for 3pm rehearsals on Monday.

Robe again sponsored the 2026 TPi Award for Lighting Designer of the Year, which went to Matt Pittman, founder and lead creative of design studio Pixelmappers. His recent work has included the lighting and production design for Dua Lipa's 2025 Radical Optimism world tour and tours for Deftones, Disclosure, Blur, and Fred Again.

The award was presented by Ian W Brown, Robe UK's sales director. Other notable winners this year include Tess Falcone, who won Lighting Operator of the Year www.youtube.com/watch?v=4W4OX9AzgmQt and Jake Vernum, who won Stage Manager of the Year www.youtube.com/watch?v=6nZ_dyTR25k.

Neg Earth won Favorite Lighting Rental Company of the Year, and the Outstanding Event Production of the Year went to Oasis Live 2025. Roger Barrett was honored with the TPi Industry Recognition Award.