SGM luminaires for the ultimate water spectacle
- Details
Watermusic consisted of a stunning choreographed piece involving dancers, musicians, a 300-voice choir, aerialists - even aquatic jetpacks, boats and much more. Sound, AV and lighting were supplied by Nordic Rental; their package included multiple SGM IP65-rated LED luminaires: 120 P-5 wash lights, six P-1 wash lights and 25 G-Spot moving heads.
In association with Randers EgnsTeater, the show had international touch from the dancers from Motionhouse in UK, the visual dream-images created by multimedia artists from Spanish Logela and the music composed by International Danish star ‘Oh Land’ and performed by herself and the choir.
Working across performance and event genres specializing in large scale, site specific and landscape work, Phil Supple was engaged full-time on the project two months prior to premiere:
“The starting point was a 3D Vectorworks model of the harbour buildings. From that, I developed working drawings for the technical team and a lighting layout of the entire site. This made for a very efficient process translating my visual ideas into hard technical info.
“The most exciting thing for me about lighting design on this scale is the realization of really big images directly from your imagination - the challenge to use light to paint from your mind - and for that to work you really need the right tools.”
Despite the grain harvest arriving during the build, a big part of Phil Supple’s lighting design was to illuminate the windows of the granary buildings, using 96 SGM P-5 wash lights installed inside the buildings.
“Instead of just having a flat projective surface, the building could be animated and come to life with these amazing P-5s - in a very dusty and difficult environment. The P-5s were perfect really, they are completely waterproof for outdoors but also dust-tight for operation inside the granary buildings. It’s just the perfect instrument. Particularly the colour response is unique; there are no other instruments that get the same kind of beautiful theatrical tone in transition and they deliver a fantastic range of colours,” says Phil Supple.
On the top deck of the harbour master’s tugboat, the Queen of the Sea performed by Oh Land stood lit by six small battery-driven SGM P-1 wash lights.
Additionally, 25 SGM G-Spot moving heads were deployed along both sides of the harbour lighting the water. “I used reflected light from the water on a lot of occasions instead of lighting the show directly. I was particularly pleased with the angles I could achieve and obviously the control that a moving head gives you over the direction, intensity and colour range - and with the G-Spot - the absence of a dome, which is really important to keep the look clean.”
Lighting programmer Lawrence Stromski utilised a GrandMA2 to control the lights and managed an astounding 330 lighting cues in the 45-minute show.
The scale of the project and size of the site spread on two sides of the water provided infrastructural challenges with fibre link running under the water for AV, audio, and lights. “Lars Jacob Pedersen’s team from Nordic did an amazing job - the process of just installing the rig was very time consuming. One of the technicians monitored how much he was walking in the process of rigging and it came to 18km a day,” Phil Supple reports.
(Jim Evans)
