JASENICE, Croatia – The 2016 Winnetou Festival, which celebrates a fictional Native American hero of several novels written in German by Karl May, also honored Pierre Brice, the French actor who portrayed the Apache chief in popular German movies. The event took place June 4-11, a year after Brice’s death, at age 86, on June 6, 2015. A memorial service highlighting the Tulove Grede mountain peaks included dramatic visuals from German lighting design company MBLightarts . The multimedia visuals made use of 34 SGM P5 RGBW washes to light up the rocks. The fixtures ran off power generators and relied upon W-DMX for wireless control.
More details from W-DMX (www.wirelessdmx.com):
To mark the first anniversary of the passing of Pierre Brice during Winnetou Festival 2016, a memorial service took place in Croatia at the peak of the massif Tulove Grede. German lighting design company MBLightarts was tasked to put together a multimedia show – they sketched the setup based on satellite images and local maps, studied some of the effects locally and took equipment and staff to Croatia during the first week of June, having had their debut on the 6th of June.
The team took in total 34x SGM P5 RGBW washes to lit up the rocks, split in 8 groups, each with a 5.2kVA generator, as there was no power supply on-site. In order to control these fixtures, MBLightarts used W-DMX™ from Wireless Solution – 6x WhiteBox F-1 G4S transceivers were used, some with the standard 3dBi omni-directional antennas [where the distance was shorter], and the remaining with the Outdoor 8/10 Dualband Antenna.
“The furthest receiver was at 1km from the transmitter”, said Samuel Siegel, of MBLightarts. “Using W-DMX™ was extremely important in this circumstance, due to the extreme terrain, long distance to the lights, and the fact that a great part of the terrain had war mines, left from the war in Yugoslavia!”. The chosen desk to operate this one-of-a-kind event was a HOG4, which was positioned 800 meters from most of the rig.
The overall experience seemed to be quite eventful for the team – a storm came down on the first day of fit-up [just to prove how good the IP rating of all the fixtures and transceivers was], several struggles with the tough terrain, and even an unexpected visit by a pack of wolves [which were definitely not part of the local crew!].
W-DMX™ is known for providing a wireless DMX link through long distances – in areas like this, where there is practically no interference from other devices, W-DMX™ can provide a solid link up to 700 meters between devices, out of the box. Where it’s necessary to go further, as MBLightarts needed, the use of directional antennas is of extreme importance, in order to concentrate the radio waves straight from the source to the destination. “The radios are built to only transmit DMX data”, says Niclas Arvidsson, CEO of Wireless Solution. “Because of the low bandwidth, we are able to send data to really long distances. This is what makes us different from Zigbee, Bluetooth or any 802.11 protocol, making our technology a lot more reliable”, Arvidsson added.
Wireless Solution is distributed and supported in Germany by Lightpower.
Selected photos by Christian Holthausen
