Sydney-based Mandylights lighting designers Richard Neville and Alex Grierson were part of the international creative team that lit the world’s tallest building – the 2,722-foot-hight Burj Khalifa in Dubai — for New Year’s and the month of January. The sheer scale of the project was a challenge, with the need to light scores of performers on 15 stages across a vast swath of land and water for an on-site audience of 1.7 million. Another challenge was in making the show work as a unified whole, coordinating the dynamic aspects of 350 intelligent lights, video projection, flame projectors and thousands of water fountains. “I love to use strong lines of light in my designs, so I approached this show in the same way,” says Neville. “I put long lines of ACL fixtures in across the tops of the various screens so we could suggestively extend the color and content of the video out from the screen surfaces and then made sure we programmed with a lot of detail to keep the lighting true to the video,” he adds. “My associate, Alex Grierson, and I split the rig up into parts and programmed separate cue lists so that we could each pay more attention to specific parts of the rig. In some sequences, I’d have a couple of cues while Alex would be madly programming moving lights to follow each step of performers on the lake stages, while at other times I was frantically programming reactive cues to the 210-meter-long (689-foot-long) screen while Alex would have time for a coffee.”
—From “Designer Watch” by Debi Moen, PLSN, April, 2013.
