An epic lighting project spanning multiple sites across the country, including the nine wind turbines that stand at sea off the shore at Blyth, a Winter Wonderland Show at Kielder Water, the Woodhorn Museum and Country Park, the hillside area of Simonside, Bamburgh Castle and a 'Guerrilla Lighting' team intended to make surprise appearances at other sites around the country on its own initiative and responding to suggestions from the public, Northumberland Lights runs from late October 2006 through to late March 2007.
White Light are supplying the lighting equipment and production and support services to the event, with teams of local technicians and staff from White Light led by White Light's Jack Thompson working to fulfil a brief that requires automated and conventional architectural fixtures to be running outside in all weather conditions and across multiple locations, as well as the project's ambition to use renewable energy sources and biodiesel fuel where possible.
For the lighting of the wind turbines at Blyth, together with the project's launch parade at the Blyth Quayside, White Light supplied StudioDue CityColor 2500W and CityColor 400 outdoor colour changing floodlights to light the turbines themselves alongside Martin MAC 2000 Spotlights with weatherproof domes, 400W MBI floodlights, PAR64s, ETC Source Fours and Avo Pearl 2000 consoles. The launch parade saw Supple and the White Light team use lighting to lead the visiting audience on a procession through the town to the Quayside; there they saw a Pilot boat breaking searchlight beams of lights across the river, triggering pyrotechnics designed by The World Famous and culminating in the reveal of the lit wind turbines.
At the Woodhorn site, the design team made use of White Light's Digital Festoon System to create two low-resolution pixel matrices. The ideal solution for this project, with its individual control of every lamp along an easily rigged single length of festoon and its safe, low-voltage operation, the Digital Festoon System arrays were programmed to create patterns of light and movement visible throughout the day but most obvious as daylight gave way to dusk and then night-time darkness.
At the Leaplish waterside park at Kielder Water, a daily show has been created telling the story of a giant, magical fish, Santa Claus and a very lucky child! The giant fish, created over the shell of a boat, is attracted to the shore by one of Santa's Elves sprinkling fish food on the water, it's appearance controlled and made magical by lighting.
At Simonside, carefully positioned lighting is used to bring the natural shapes and forms of the hillside's boulders and outcrops to life, creating a ghostly lunar landscape that seems to grow out of the dusk, while at Bamburgh Castle the building's existing floodlighting scheme was re-coloured and supplemented to create lighting that seems to grow out of the castle itself.
Finally, with the rest of the installations up and running, White Light's Jack Thompson's Guerrilla Lighting project - a vanload of equipment accompanied by a Land Rover towing a biodiesel generator - will appear in other locations throughout the region, set up discretely during the afternoon and bring other landmarks to life for one night only!
"The installation work for Northumberland Lights began on October 16th," comments White Light's Jack Thompson, "and has continued ever since, with the switch on of each phase of the project being followed by the installation of the next. We're all now simultaneously exhausted and elated, since the project has been receiving an overwhelmingly excited reception fr
