In November, Australian Outback Spectacular ‘Heroes of the Light Horse’ closed its doors for the final time to make way for an exciting new show.
The third chapter in the Australian Outback Spectacular story is titled ‘‘Spirit of the Horse with a Tribute to Phar Lap’ and celebrates the courageous spirit of the Australian horse and honors the legend that is Phar Lap.
Australian Outback Spectacular first opened in 2006, with the second show ‘Heroes of the Light Horse’ launching in September 2009 and proving a huge success. Australian Outback Spectacular has entertained millions of visitors from all over the world.
For the new show lighting designer Clint Dulieu has a whole new rig of fancy new lights but he has stayed true to his faithful MA Lighting MA2 console
“Our MA2 has been absolutely fantastic and the operators love it,” he remarked. “We initially went with the MA2 because of how well the MA consoles ‘play well with others’ in terms of integrating them with the other show control systems. The big thing for me was the ability to highly automate the console to make the show very friendly to operate for our techs; the highly advanced macro structure in the MA really lends itself to this. The new show is heavily automated and the MA2 has to run specials such as air cannon blasts, fans, CO2 jets, rain and fire effects. We customize the effects through another show controller for safety reasons but it is all triggered by the MA2.”
Clint has upgraded to version 5 of coolux’s Pandora’s Box media and show control system and he just loves the new features.
“It’s great, a lot more user friendly,” he said. “They have really improved the user interface; it’s a lot more customizable now especially with being to reorganize how your layers sit. You’re not locked into four video layers and then on top of that graphics layers. It enables us to do a lot of masking very easily now having unlimited graphic layers. Most people would think that with a show like this the content would come ready to go and rendered but that’s not the case. We have to do a lot of work altering and developing the content within Pandora’s Box to suit the requirements of the show and the director. It’s been good to be able to do that and as usual, Pandora’s Box has been extremely reliable.
“What was really good is that we could run our old show concurrently on the old version whilst we were programming the new show in the new version all on the same machines and that was very important and time saving.”
Four Robert Juliat Topaz followspots were also purchased and Clint reports that the operators love them and although they’re only 1200 watts they are still much brighter than the old 2500 watt follow spots he had previously.
“Plus their optics are much better,” he added. “Show Technology also provided us with other bits and pieces that we decided on an almost daily whim where needed for the show! As always Showtech were there at a moments notice to fulfill my crazy needs.”
The LED set lighting was upgraded to some new Pro Shop LED Strips, plus there is a wireless LED Par and a Look Solutions Tiny Fogger in a flaming 44 gallon drum. Baby Pro Shop PWM dimmers are used in another battery powered effect.
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