In order to entice tenants to the Melbourne’s new Eastland Shopping Centre, a cocktail party was held with a Yarra Valley produce theme. Three truck-loads of trees were shipped in to construct a lush forest.
“It seemed that every time we put some lights up, half an hour later they were encased in branches so it wasn’t so much a matter of focusing more a matter of pruning!” commented lighting designer for the event Richard Grenfell.
Richard wanted a look of dappled light coming through the trees but how to rig a fixture that delivers a fat and wide-angle beam with only a four metre trim in the venue, was a problem. The only fixture that could do this was the Clay Paky B-EYE which Richard used in a static mode.
“If you take the B-EYEs out of their disco / kaleidoscope mode into a nice fat breakup beam and then use the inbuilt effects to very slowly put orange onto a dark orange, it really gives a great theatrical look of light shining through trees,” he said. “Clay Paky innovate so many things; they came up with the Sharpy which has taken over in lighting and now they have the B-EYE which I really like. The effects the B-EYE produces are like none other.”
Added to the eight B-EYE’s were Clay Paky Alpha Profile 700’s, using the real foliage as shadows and breakup gobos, as well as quite a few Martin MAC Auras.
Control was a Martin M2GO chosen because the control room was small, difficult to get to and had limited viewing which got increasingly limited as more tree branches were added.
“It meant that we could use an iPhone to recall scenes without having to climb the ladder up to where the console was situated,” said Richard. “It was very handy.”
Lighting was supplied by Resolution X.
