After last year’s resounding debut, Melbourne Festival collaborated with renowned design specialists, Bluebottle to create a brand new Foxtel Festival Hub structure in 2013 on a larger scale.
Situated on the Peppercorn Lawn of Alexandra Parklands this year’s Festival Hub covered approximately 1800 square metres, with a total site capacity of 1200. The precinct featured a main performance venue with a seated capacity of 300, standing capacity of 500, sized at 21 metres long x 12 wide x 5.4 metres high and a decked area surrounding with a capacity for 700.
Melbourne Festival Technical Manager Aaron Hock was tasked with ensuring the venue had a top notch lighting system and so he turned to Resolution X. Both Aaron and the event’s lighting designer Paul Lim were distraught to discover that all of ResX’s MA2 consoles were already snaffled by savvy clients but Simon Barrett, Show Technology’s Technical Sales guru in Melbourne, saved the day!
“The performance venue was very busy with usually three shows per night so we needed a console that could be programmed quickly and that was flexible,” commented Aaron. “Fortunately Simon and Marcus Pugh at ResX were able to team up and provide us with an MA2.”
According the Aaron the MA2 performed flawlessly over the seventeen days of the festival.
Lighting designer Paul Lim is also impressed by the flexibility of the MA2 and the way he can modify the set up for different situations.
“I use the MA2 for theatre as well as music situations,” he said. “The effects engine is great; easy to use and easy to generate good looking effects quickly. We had a pixel mapped structure of PixPads and we were able to create some really interesting looking effects without running video.”
The PixPads were arranged in the shape of a lightning bolt, which was the main graphic for this year’s festival, interspersed by Sunstrips.
“The PixPads were actually too bright for this application so we put a frost over them!” commented Paul. “I was using them as a visual tool rather than an actual light source. They were easy to use and rig. We had lots of comments from the public and festival staff about how good they looked. It was the first time I’ve used Sunstrips and they were excellent.”
Also in the rig were Martin MAC700s, MAC250 Kryptons, MAC101s, MAC301s, and Atomic Strobes.
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