HUDDERSFIELD, U.K. – Huddersfield's Festival of Light took place in early December in St. George's Square, and related events included the Trail of Light for local landmarks, included a dynamic lighting design for the exterior of the Media Centre building. TG Events' Tim Garbutt organized the festival for Kirklees Council, and James Bawn, with AC Entertainment Technologies, worked with Garbutt on a freelance basis to light the Media Centre building. Bawn used 84 1044 JTE PixelLine LED fixtures from PixelRange – 14 units on each of the building's six levels.
"I knew exactly what I wanted to do once I'd done the initial site visit," Bawn said. "The building has a unique aluminum-clad structure within the outer wall. This was a great opportunity to bring the building to life and highlight the modern architecture."
Bawn preprogrammed the PixelLines using the PixelMapper component on a Green Hippo HippoCritter. "Using PixelMapper was very simple and gave me a chance to pre-program most of the content before we arrived on site," he noted.
For the actual event, the content and presets were transferred across to one of the Hippotizer HDs rented from gear supplier HSL.
The content was based on Hippotizer stock content, which was manipulated and edited to fit the building PixelMap using the onboard effects engines, thus creating a range of different looks that ran across the building.
The project employed a total of 4536 DMX channels, and Bawn used several Luminex Gigaswitches and Luminex Ethernet to DMX boxes to convert the Art-Net signal into DMX.
The installation was done in two days' time. Bawn credited Lee House, his colleague from AC Entertainment Technologies' Video Department, for assistance with the project, and thanked Tom Etra from Green Hippo for his on-site support.
For more information, please visit www.green-hippo.com.
