This year, the historical theme park celebrates its 25th anniversary and Cinéscénie heads up a programme of live productions at the cultural attraction, which first opened in the heart of the Vendée region of Western France in 1989.
This summer, the show, which lasts 1hr 40 min, has reached over 10m spectators and is described as the largest night-time show on earth. Taking place every Friday and Saturday, the show featured 1,200 actors, 300 animals, 24,000 costumes, 1,000 fireworks, 3,000 projectors, and a 23-hectare stage.
The brief from Puy du Fou asked for a complete re-design of the lighting concept. Vermeulen worked alongside Pavla Beranova, Jean Jacques Deneumoustier and Jimmy Stas from the ACT Lighting Design team and Damien Botton from Puy du Fou's technical team. Together they designed a concept that incorporated both standard and custom-made lighting fixtures.
The fixtures were positioned throughout the site and complex programming techniques were used to control and sync the lighting with the other aspects of the show.
"The Clay Paky Alpha 1500s and Sharpys along with a number of other bespoke made lighting effects and techniques enabled us to create new drama for the show lighting," explains Vermeulen. "We sculpted the space out of the darkness using the narrow beam capability of the Alpha 1500s as side and key light along with colourful front light and foot lighting using custom made RGBW LED fixtures. In addition we provided strong architectural feeling back-lighting with banks of Sharpys.
"Thanks to these robust technologies we were able to create a real sense of dimension, volume and depth to each principal scene, while at the same time achieving new dramatic effects in terms of colour changing and fixture positioning, plus a number of extra looks that really highlighted specific scenes."
(Jim Evans)
