Sydney’s New Year’s Eve is a celebration that wows the world with its style and spectacle. Featuring one of the world’s largest, most technologically advanced displays of fireworks, lighting and projections, Sydney New Year’s Eve plays live to more than 1 million spectators along the Sydney Harbour foreshore and reaches a global audience of more than 425 million.
For seven years, Ziggy Ziegler of ZZ Creative has worked with 32 Hundred Lighting, Foti Fireworks, the City of Sydney, ABC TV National broadcast team plus many artists and technical production companies, in lighting the event. Each year special artists are brought on board to design the audio tracks, projection content and calling country performance/show as well.
The total number of lights used is now in the many thousands including 260 x custom high-intensity LED Pars, 20-60 waterproof super bright beam lights (both arc light and laser fixtures), 5000 LED pixels on the bridge and thousands of LED pixels at Luna Park on the Ferris wheel and venue buildings, to another 60,000 odd pixels across boats in the Harbour. Added to that are hundreds of lights brought in by the ABC for the main performance stage and the thousands of lights around the Harbour at various private and public events making the city foreshore and waterways radiantly glow all night long.
“So much of it is dependent on the right fixture choice, from the custom lenses on fixtures to the specific LED emitter choice,” commented Ziggy. “Quite a few fixtures on the bridge are custom designed for the bridge to deliver brilliant light for the camera and the public audience. Even the beam light choice is unusual favouring the ability to pierce light through the sky over the number of effects or features. You won’t find our usual concert and theatre lanterns up there on New Year’s Eve.”
Control and networking are via the tried and tested MA Lighting grandMA2 console and node system as this event needs to have reliable controls familiar to all.
“There isn’t the time onsite to figure things out,” added Ziggy. “With a site that is over 134m tall, 1km wide and when encompassing the fibre network and console locations a grid of 2km by 2km you need equipment you know well.”
There are so many stakeholders and authorities involved across the city, state, Harbour, business, local community and private enterprise on this one night. Designing and programming the lights is just one part of a huge job organised over many months of the year every year. Everyone from CASA and the police to the opera house teams and bus driver’s union will want to meet with you and chat about something.
“Once you get through all that and the media calls and interviews, the production and creative meetings as well as testing phases for new lighting ideas, you can get into the studio finally to play creatively,” said Ziggy.
Ziggy says that 32 Hundred’s studio is pretty impressive utilizing several grandMA2 consoles, grandMA 3D, Unreal Engine, Catalyst, Xlights software, 60 Elation DMX record and playback units, lots of NPUs, several large screens, a small audio system, LTC timecode and several content playback devices to view simulations and animations and audio tracks in various formats with timecode …. with the ability to put all of this together into something they can program with. There are around 130 universes of DMX for just the bridge alone, before they get to the light boats, Luna Park Ferris wheel and building lighting.
“Putting all of this into one piece of software would slow even the top-end graphics computers down too much to be practical,” remarked Ziggy. “There is also the political and technical situations in place around maritime and venue policies and equipment. So the best approach that works with the time frame and budget, is to learn all the various formats and equipment and make it all work together. This comes down to our amazing lighting team, with systems and network headed up by Adam Smith and all sorts of programming and operating, along with creative input, from Ben Ronczka. There is also a large team of crew and technicians from 32 Hundred that work long hours to make this all happen.”
Ziggy adds that building their own custom lighting visualiser from scratch in Unreal Engine was a key factor in making the pre-visualization easy to use and worthwhile visually for all involved. They can customize the properties of the lights and how they output light in Unreal Engine in a way that cannot be done in most lighting visualisers like L8, Capture or WYSWYG.
“It means that they look like more than tiny little pixel dots when we view the whole Harbour Bridge from over a kilometre away in the virtual world,” he said. “Combining this with the grandMA 3D software, Xlights and Catalyst, as well as a few smaller systems, gives us great flexibility and the ability to adapt to any changes in creative and pre-production.”
From full timecode and automated playback to radio-triggered cues and pre-recorded manually operated sequences, various methods are used around the Harbour to make it all work on the night. There are many manual cues during the night that are done live in a busking fashion to integrate with the ABC live concert and special public moments on the Harbour such as the World Pride moment this year or the time countdown.
“In a nutshell, the lighting consoles are busy from 8:30pm to 2am running cues of one sort or another,” said Ziggy. “There is no real downtime for the operational crew during this fantastic night. The custom LED Pars is my favourite light for large-scale outdoor events, but the new laser source beam lights (Laser Sharks) did get a big smile from me this year. They are stunning in the night sky.
“This show does not happen without the team led by Iain Reed, Ben and Adam. I am very lucky to work with them all and have the opportunity to be creative and play on a very fun night of the year. When the whole of Sydney Harbour screams out “Happy New Year” at midnight, it makes all the challenges worth it every single time.”
The 32 Hundred team work closely with the ABC, Hugh Taranto and Chameleon Touring Systems who deliver the live show on the Opera House forecourt.
