High Impact Lighting

The Enchanted Garden at Roma Street Parkland

Brisbane’s Roma Street Parkland has been hosting ‘The Enchanted Garden’ Christmas light display for six years. A free event, and usually somewhat sedate, it’s traditionally been a static but beautiful fairy light display for families to enjoy while walking through the gardens. At least it was until the 2020-21 season, when Ash Neuendorf and High Impact Lighting got involved. “Yeah, I might have got a bit bored during COVID and got a bit hectic with the design,” admits Ash…

With eleven separate experiences plus the entry, Ash’s own design brief was to never repeat a look or style once the audience had seen it.

“One of the criticisms we’d heard from previous years was that kids in particular would get bored after three minutes,” Ash relates. “I have two kids, and my youngest has just turned three, so I kept them in mind when designing it.

“I wanted to tell a story, so the show is always introducing new things, and hopefully the kids don’t get bored!”

The Inevitable COVID Overlay
While Queensland has been one of the least virus-affected states, Ash and High Impact have still had the majority of their work cancelled.

Thankfully, Queensland Health were quick to approve Enchanted Gardens’ 2020-21 season, largely due to it being outside and easily controllable in terms of visitors. Bump-in was undertaken over a two-week period, with programming and timecoding for three days after everything was in and connected.

“The whole show is set-up so our site techs just press ‘play’ and the whole show syncs together,” explains Ash. “The hardest part of running the show is just how long it goes for. It’s over two months, with two staff on site. They get in at 3 pm and turn it on, and turn it off and leave at 10:30 pm.

“There used to be 8,000 allowed through at a time, but that’s reduced to 2,000 due to COVID, so they’re running more shows over a longer time period. And it’s such a large site that you’re better off riding a bike than walking!”

The Great Outdoors
The reinvented Enchanted Garden is all about taking what was a static show and making it dynamic. This meant control, programming, content, and distribution. “This all needed to be controllable and mappable, so we needed to roll out consoles, media servers, and fibre,” offers Ash.

“What we discovered is that installing all of that tech into a parkland is so much more challenging than setting it up for a stage. On paper everything looked really cool, and it is, but it is hard to implement this kind of design outside, at scale, in weather.

“The fun part for us was going through the visual concepts from scratch and figuring out how to make it work, even if the general public will never have any idea what makes all of it go!”

Control, Media Server, and Data
All up, Ash’s design ended up consuming a solid 64 DMX Universes of data, and also added audio via Dante at the Pendant Bridge and Lake.

Handling the bulk of control duties is High Impact’s trusty ChamSys MagicQ MQ500 Stadium console. It takes an Art-Net feed from media server software Resolume running on a PC (which provides video for pixel mapping) and merges it with the Art-Net data programmed in the console before sending it all out.

It’s also running sACN. It’s a complex set-up, but rock solid.

Resolume is running video custom created by High Impact for each area, pixel mapped across the huge LED canvasses Ash has designed, including fairy light curtains, neon flex, addressable fixtures, and more.

It’s a complex set-up, but rock solid

The ChamSys is programmed to feed the pixel mapped LEDs shifting background colours, while Resolume runs video over the top, adding patterns and shapes.

Practicalities and the Environment
While obviously an outdoor gig in a steamy Brisbane summer, the first environmental challenge was the garden’s infrastructure. “The sprinkler system came on when we were bumping in!” laughs Ash.

“That was a waterproofing test as good as, if not better than, rain. When a storm came through a week later, we knew we had already been tested and passed.”

The reinvented Enchanted Garden is all about taking what was a static show and making it dynamic

With such a complex show, Ash and High Impact had a lot of power and data to manage while ensuring that it would be in no way affected by the weather.

They divided up the Parkland into four power zones, serviced by five LSC Control Systems APS intelligent power distribution systems. The APS units send out all power, breaking out to Neutrik powerCON TRU.

For the all-important Art-Net, sACN and Dante data, four Luminex Gigacore fibre nodes service five zones of the show. Ash also relies on Luminex LumiNode DMX splitters to keep the show running headache-free.

“I had to replace two other DMX splitters that died within two weeks; both were power supply failures,” sighs Ash. “I replaced them with LumiNodes because we just don’t have those issues with Luminex.

“We just don’t want to worry about it, and Luminex do peace-of-mind really well. Both the LumiNodes and Gigacores have been flexible and rock-solid, working on all of our large projects.”

Highlights
When asked which parts of the Enchanted Garden are his favourites, Ash nominates the Pendant Bridge and Spectacle Garden.

“The Pendant Bridge has the SGM LED ball drops coming down from bendy pipe. There’s 42 of them hanging down, all pixel mapped, and the video file is really fun.

“In the Spectacle Garden, we have a Kvant 10W laser projecting into the treetops. As the trees are naturally staggered, when you run laser patterns up into the canopies, you get this great sense of depth and play. People tend to stop and stare in a bit of awe, which is very satisfying.

“Overall, what I really love is that every section of the show is different. It keeps people guessing as they walk through and experience new elements as they appear.”

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The Enchanted Garden Control System:

1 x Yamaha TF Rack with Dante

4 x Audinate Dante AVIO DUO

2 x Bird Dog Studio NDI

1 x Show PC – Resolume video & Pixel Map

1 x Show PC – Beyond Laser Software

1 x Show PC – Ableton Live (tracks and timecode)

1 x Chamsys MQ500

5 x LSC APS 3 Phase Units

5 x Luminex Gigacore 10

5 x LumiNode 4

1 x LumiNode 12

8 x LumiNode 1

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High Impact Lighting
www.highimpactlighting.com

CX Magazine – February 2021   

LIGHTING  |  AUDIO  |  VIDEO  |  STAGING  |  INTEGRATION

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