Emphasising the multicultural history of Singapore and themed Project Wonderland, this year's parade featured 13 floats, with over 4,000 performers from 40 organisations from Singapore and seven other countries including Taiwan, Thailand, Indonesia, India, South Korea and The Philippines. An estimated 150.000 visitors joined the performers along the streets to celebrate and watch the spectacle.
Organised and presented by the People's Association, the parade was followed by Singapore's biggest street dance party City Alive in front of the City Hall building, with DJs from UK, Japan and Hong Kong. Covering the City Hall's front, lighting designer Roy Chooi from Highlight-Systems opted for a grandMA system.
"It was very important to have a powerful board with instant backup possibilities as the spectacle was recorded for later broadcast on Channel 5, Channel 8 and Channel News Asia," reported Roy Chooi. "Furthermore we required a system that was flexible enough to cater for two programmers working in parallel on the show, as the venue switched into a street dance party right after the parade."
Another grandMA light console was used to drive two networked media servers running grandMA's video software that were connected to eight Christie projectors. Operator Gideon Chiam especially appreciated the motorised faders of the grandMA when switching pages and programming new cues. Given the extremely short time frame for preparation, it helped him to finish the programming just in time.
An additional grandMA ultra-light with its four universes was used by Show Company to control eight Barco DML-1200s. This setup used the inbuilt Art-Net capability of the grandMA to run the projectors straight over Ethernet cable. With no DMX cabling required, this greatly simplified the setup, and made full use of the bidirectional reporting capabilities available over Ethernet.
Under the umbrella of CSP Productions, SCM Production and Unusual Productions provided the two grandMA full-size and four MA NSPs. The grandMA light, grandMA ultra-light and two media servers were provided by Glorious (S) Pte.
(Jim Evans)
