This year’s Nightfest at Canberra’s Floriade was a Showtechfest when it came to lighting fixtures. Res X supplied the lighting gear to Mandylights who were lighting and production designers for the event.
As well as lighting the large site complete with a couple of dozen flower beds, Mandylights also had to provide all of the functional site lighting. This year, they decided to light the main flower bed vista with forty-eight Martin MAC Auras and twenty-four Clay Paky Sharpys.
“We were really keen to try the MAC Auras as we’ve never tried them before on this project and we love the colours that come out of them,” commented Richard Neville, director of Mandylights. “Every year we do a different colour scheme for the flower beds and this year we wanted to use pastel colours of which the MAC Auras have a great range. The Sharpys worked well too because we needed something small with a powerful beam.”
Another flower bed which was presented as a fifty metre-wide map of the world, was lit with festooning in the bed but Richard needed a very high output LED flood to deliver an intense shade of blue.
“Res X gave us the Pro Shop LED Flood waterproof fixtures which ticked all of the boxes for us,” added Richard.
The Rhododendron Garden always houses a special install and this year it was full of inflatable flowers with LED tape installed in them. Richard then required a fairly compact moving light that could go really wide when required and this led him to the MAC Viper.
“We used six MAC Vipers and they worked very well,” he said. “They have the best stock gobo collection Martin has ever produced; they’re all very usable, high impact gobos but there are some great theatrical gobos too. We could do some really nice break up patterns but get really trippy when we needed to.”
Control was all MA Lighting, as it has been for the past five years, and Richard reports that they have never had an issue.
“We run the MA2’s and NPU’s in temperatures from minus 5 degrees up to high 20 degrees, we chuck them in the back of buggies to move them around the park and they’ve never missed a beat,” he remarked.