SANDUSKY, Ohio — “Luminosity, Powered by Pepsi” lights up Celebration Plaza at Cedar Point with hundreds of CHAUVET fixtures as part of the show. The 35-minute interactive experience of lights, video, and DJ action ends the day for visitors enjoying the amusement park this summer.
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SANDUSKY, Ohio — “Luminosity, Powered by Pepsi” lights up Celebration Plaza at Cedar Point, the second-oldest operating amusement park in the United States. The 35-minute interactive experience ends a day of excitement at the park this summer. Hundreds of CHAUVET fixtures are part of this show that features light displays, music and dance performances, special effects, fireworks, pyrotechnics and live DJ action.
“Luminosity” concentrates about 700 CHAUVET lights, making it the focal point of Cedar Point come nightfall. More CHAUVET fixtures light up Millennium Force and Power Tower attraction rides, and the Midway show that takes the visitor on a colorful experience from the entrance of the park to Celebration Plaza, place of “Luminosity.”
Al Crawford, Lighting Designer and President of Arc3design, designed the lighting rig for “Luminosity.” “We love designing for dance, theater, concert, live event, and environmental projects,” Crawford said. “We mixed all of our experiences in these genres into one huge project.”
Andrew Strain, lighting designer and owner of Blue Haze Entertainment, specified the CHAUVET fixtures and programmed the lighting for the Midway show, Millennium Force roller coaster and Power Tower attraction. Jeremy Doucette was production designer.
While designing Luminosity Celebration Plaza, Crawford looked to create the ideal environment for a live entertainment-based evening experience. “The design needed to serve the needs of the stage show itself, the after party club experience, and to integrate seamlessly with other design elements such as scenic and video. All elements needed to breath as one.”
One challenge Crawford overcame relates to the significant scale of the project. “The park wanted a space that was almost operatic on certain levels, but at the same time intimate and storytelling,” he said. “We needed to find and create systems of fixtures that could fill large spaces, but could also do it with a certain grace. We used a lot of different vocabularies of equipment, for example the Legend 412 from CHAUVET.”
Crawford wanted to fill not only the space on the stage and audience, but also the sky above the performance space. “We used lighting to do dynamic aerial effects that supported the pyrotechnics and lasers in the sky,” Crawford said.
“Most of the lighting systems had significant fixture totals due to the scale of the set and the overall size of the space. We had a lot of room to fill with creative visual stimulus,” he added.
A series of long sweeping continuous curves from 138 Legend 412 pixel-mapping moving yokes are designed into the environment, creating one rocking system of light that encircled the space. “We enjoyed the Legend 412 because we knew with these beautiful curves of lighting fixtures, we could create something that was organic,” Crawford said. “With this fixture we could push color in mass and play against the grid-like qualities of the set, or if desired, we could play off the geometry and use them for their pixel-mapping capabilities to create stunning rhythmic effects.”
The stage houses video walls made of 112 MVP 18 and 34 MVP 37.5 modular video panels, displaying live video content programmed into the show. The video content was created exclusively for Luminosity by Bob Bonniol, video, lighting and interactive designer, specializing in designing large-scale lighting, and principal creative director for Mode Studios.
Distributed throughout the system for stage washing are 65 COLORado 1-Tri IP, while 84 SlimPAR 56 fixtures in custom outdoor housings were used on each truss tower and for truss toning.
“The COLORado 1-Tri IP lights were a great solution for us,” Crawford said. “These are solid LED PAR-like wash lights that are a strong solution for a fixed focus pre-lens color mixing PAR. We were surprised by the brilliance of the whites of this fixture and used it extensively throughout the show as additional strobes.”
To accent the architectural design, Crawford used 48 COLORdash Accent RGB and 52 COLORdash Accent VW lights. “Unique and fast, we placed the COLORdash Accent RGB fixtures on every corner of the set to create a grid pattern,” he said. “It gave us a color mixing point of light at every intersection of the scaffold, so I was able to bring forward the architecture of Doucette’s brilliant set by using this cost-effective solution.”
The show is programmed as a standalone experience, but the adjacent rides are used as surfaces. “Actually, we had enough output from the fixtures from the main show to light all of the attractions surrounding the experience during certain sequences, which was a great opportunity. I believe the guests at Cedar Point enjoy seeing their rides in a whole new light,” Crawford said.
