The four-day festival ran from November 5-9, 2009, with the highlight being the Festival of Freedom held at the landmark Brandenburg Gate. Thousands of guests attended the evening of 9 November to celebrate the fall of the wall 20 years ago.
The Berlin Staatskapelle and State Opera Chorus, conducted by Daniel Barenboim, opened the ceremony on the Pariser Platz. Potsdamer Platz, 18th of March Square and the Reichstag all held major events as well. Lighting designer was Gerd Helinski, managing director of Helicon-Media. After the concert, the fall of the Berlin Wall was symbolized with the toppling of a domino wall made up of over 1000 giant Styrofoam dominoes, stacked along the entire wall path. Following the symbolic 'fall', hundreds of thousands of people filled the street festivals in one giant party, complete with a fireworks display.
Helicon-Media specified a system including 90 DeSisti Outdoor 5kW Fresnels, various blinders by Major, 12 Falcon 7kW and 30 HES Showguns, controlled by two grandMA Full Size consoles and two MA NSPs. To reliably deliver signal to the fixtures, 10 Wireless Solution W-DMX BlackBox S-1 transmitters and 15 W-DMX Outdoor BlackBox R-512 receivers solved the problem.
"We have been using W-DMX equipment successfully since the soccer World Cup in 2006," said Helinski, "The W-DMX system has worked at numerous events beyond the specified limits of the system. For instance, we have used the system over a distance of 2.3 kilometers reliably and without interference at the opening ceremony for the new Strelasund bridge.
"For the Festival of Freedom this year, a total of 21 light towers had to be networked. We expected it to be quite a challenge to set up a data system in an urban environment where masts of the big TV and radio stations added to the usual city data chaos. The Wireless Solution W-DMX however worked without a glitch."
(Jim Evans)
