This year’s White Night in Melbourne saw Martin Kinnane appointed as the festival’s official lighting designer. As well as overseeing all of the spectacular lighting installations, he also had his own project entitled Fingers of Light.
Fingers of Light (1) lit Melbourne Central’s iconic shot tower with a dazzling display of automated lighting. It was choreographed to enhance and highlight both the shot tower and Melbourne Central’s glass atrium ceiling.
“We used eight of the Claypaky Alpha Spot 1500 to light up the shot tower, two for each façade,” explained Martin. “I like the Alpha Spots because they have shutters and as I’m from a theatre background, I really like shutters in lights! In this case, I used the shutters to shutter off the profile to light up just to the very edge of the tower itself. We used a lot of colour, gobo tricks and even some shutter effects creating little cubes that bounced around the side of the tower.”
Fingers of Light (2) and (3) installations were located in Swanston Street. Two towers, each held ten Claypaky Mythos 2 which created beacons of light down Swanston Street, lighting up into the clouds to be visible from a distance. The Mythos 2 were choreographed to dance across the sky and alternately wash and texture the city’s buildings.
“A few years ago I used around one hundred Claypaky Sharpys on the roof of Hamer Hall for its relaunch and that worked really well as a tiny searchlight option,” commented Martin. “The Mythos 2 are so much brighter and have a great beam. They work really well as a punchy, searchlight type fixture plus one person can pick them up and you can fit ten of them in a scissor lift. Compared to the older searchlight fixtures, they’re not only lighter but move quicker and have much better colours.”
Martin used a MA Lighting grandMA2 to program the lights.
