This is basically a big Christian Youth Group rally where groups from around the southern region come together to enjoy the night filled with speakers, bands and fun. Between 2000-3000 people converge on the WIN Entertainment Centre.
The brief given to lighting designer Christopher Snape was to come up with a design based around their logo of the city scape. It needed to look big and fun but also stick within the tight budget.
Chris’ biggest challenge was to achieve everything they wanted with such a tight budget. He was basically allocated the equipment he could use with a little bit of flexibility when it came to the external hires from Chameleon and ResX.
“Also I could only use the truss from the venue and no more,” he added. “So I was very grateful that WIN let me use pretty much everything they had. Once again as always, I challenged every aspect and pushed everything to the limit. I am a very pedantic designer sometimes, maybe that’s because I’m a Virgo, but when I see things in a certain way in my head I want it exactly the same. I have been known to ask the guys to get the tape measure out once and a while!”
The equipment that was allocated to Chris included eight 2.5k RAMA Fresnel, eight 1.2k RAMA Fresnel, four 1k Pacifics, twelve Martin RUSH MH6, twelve ShowPro HEX18 LED pars, eight QUAD18 LED pars, eight Pixpads, sixteen Trussmates, four MAC250 Entours, sixteen Fusion Bars, and eight Molefays.
“I was lucky because the production company who did the show (Illawarra Production Services) had all this gear for me to use,” said Chris. “Those guys were great and very helpful in getting it all sorted for me. On top of this, I hired an extra thirty-six Pixpads, twenty-two MAC101 and seven VL2500 Spots.
“As I was programming myself, the show was driven by a Hog4 Full console from Chameleon. As per usual it worked great and I was very happy.”
Chris’ favourite lighting moment on this show was one of those moments where everything just lined up perfectly: the colour, timing and transition of the cues. It was during a completely unrehearsed band number that he had not seen.
“They told me briefly what the song was about, so I plotted a bunch of cues that I thought would suit,” remarked Chris. “During the show as the song started and the lights changed, it was just magical, and gave me goosebumps. It was as if we had rehearsed this item completely. Overall, I was very happy with this end result. I achieved everything I set out for and in the end everyone was exceptionally happy with the look.”
Production Company: Illawarra Production Services
Equipment Supplier: Chameleon Touring Systems and Resolution X
