Aktuelle News & Schlagzeilen

DBN designs lighting for festival in Abu Dhabi

DBN designs lighting for festival in Abu Dhabi
DBN designs lighting for festival in Abu Dhabi

The Abu Dhabi Tourism & Culture Authority appointed live communication specialist People as the event management agency for the 2016 Qasr Al Hosn festival, which took place February 3 to 13, 2016 in Abu Dhabi. Manchester UK based DBN Lighting was commissioned by People to provide lighting design and on-site lighting direction service.

 

Lead lighting designer Stephen Page and a team of seven designers and on-site LDs from DBN worked closely with Tom Ralston and Jonathan Godsmark from Eclipse Staging Services Dubai who provided all the lighting, AV, power and rigging equipment for the open air interactive experience.

 

DBN designed an overall scheme to light all the different areas of the site. Preparations for the 11 day event that welcomed over 130,000 visitors started the previous year, just a few months after the 2015 festival. The final designs required 3,900 separate lighting fixtures, together with around 45 kilometres of cabling and 1,200 plus metres of trussing. There were a total of 22 x Dimmer Cities across the site involving 28 lighting dimmer racks and 52 lighting power distros.

 

Control for the 24 x DMX universes of lighting required for the main site was from Eclipse's Jands Vista T2 Console, supported by one of DBN’s Jands D1 processors and additional PC based Vista consoles and wings, all acting as part of a single Vista network. This allowed operating in a tracking backup configuration and enabled network based programming and processing.

 

Stephen Page directed the programming and focus for the whole festival, supported by Nick Buckley and Pete Isherwood, with further assistance from Phil Woodbridge, Paul Crompton and Paul Moloney, all working with a crew of lighting and electrical technicians and riggers from Eclipse. A wide range of fixtures were selected from Eclipse’s stock - from a birdie to a Clay Paky Alpha Spot 1500 HPE.

 

All were rigged discreetly and concealed in surrounding scenic elements where possible, as well as from the roofs of buildings and a series of over 100 vertical truss masts across the site. Background colour washes for each area were achieved with 120 of SGM’s P5 LED floods, with further layers of texture and colour added from a range of moving lights including Clay Paky Alpha, Sharpy and A.Leda range units, plus Mac Viper, Aura, 2K and 700 series fixtures. A full range of generic fixtures was used to highlight specific areas and activities within the overall scheme.

 

In the ’Oasis’ area, each of the 100 plus palm tree trunks was up-lit with an LED PAR, while the leaves were skimmed and textured with a mix of Chauvet LED PARs and ETC Source Four profiles fitted with gobos firing through the leaf canopy.

 

Colour and texture was also provided by moving lights programmed to alter focus on cue, creating and defining areas for larger performances of traditional dance within the space. Further fixtures were rigged in the canopy of the trees themselves as ‘specials’ to gently delineate storytelling and demonstration areas.

 

The exterior of the fort was floodlit to highlight the sparkle and colour of the traditional coral stone construction, with Sharpy, Sharpy Wash and Super Sharpy fixtures being used to define the towers and outline the architecture of the buildings and walls, as well as to project the outline up into the sky above the site.

 

The Festival Arena, where Clay Paky 1500 Wash and HPE fixtures were used as the basis of a house system, played host to a number of shows produced by People. Phil Wiffen programmed and operated lighting for all the arena shows using a Hog4 Roadhog Console.

 

DBN also developed and installed the lighting design for a new permanent exhibition housed in the Qasr Al Hosn Visitor Centre located close by the fort. People designed and produced an installation telling the story of Abu Dhabi and its people through the city’s oldest building (Qasr Al Hosn) featuring displays of historic artefacts, oral testimonies and historic photographs.

 

Nigel Walker, DBN’s Special Projects designer, acted as lead designer for the exhibition area and used a range of ETC and Prolights Studio COB fixtures to complement Lumenpulse track fittings and bespoke installations of various discreet LED sources built into the structure of the exhibits.

 

www.dbn.co.uk

 

DBN designs lighting for festival in Abu DhabiDBN designs lighting for festival in Abu Dhabi

© 1999 - 2024 Entertainment Technology Press Limited News Stories