DUBLIN – For a gala corporate event staged by WRG for a pharmaceutical company at the Royal Dublin Society (RDS), DBN Lighting provided lighting gear, truss, rigging and crew. The lighting rig was designed and the event project managed for DBN by Andy Kennett. The main concept for the event, attended by 900, was to suspend a 2.5-meter dot pitch grid consisting of over 200 Pulsar ChromaSpheres above the audience, along with a large number of moving and generic lights, which brought the total roof loading to 15 tonnes.
The client's new branding was based on dots, hence the idea to go with a matrix of ChromaSpheres. The loading constraints were 350Kgs per point, and the crew needed to deal with a short timescale for the load-in and technical build.
Working alongside the venue's structural engineer and WRG technical production manager Stuart Greaves, Kennett designed a truss system that was distributed over 90 points to achieve the technical requirements and comply with the structural constraints.
In the center of the room there was a circular stage, accessed by the evening's entertainment – including a Riverdance-style Celtic dancing show – via two catwalks.
Due to the tight load-in and limited roof loadings, it was not possible to lift a single mother grid, so the lateral solution was to construct the sphere matrix in sections and fly each one out as the crew worked across the space.
Each section included two parallel 16-meter runs of Slick MiniBeam trussing bridged with scaffolding. Twenty-eight dots were then suspended from each of these on 3-meter drop wires.
The result was a sea of color-changing dots, which were pixel mapped through DBN's Hippotizer media server and fed with a variety of content. The LED table centers were also mapped through the Hippotizer so effects could mirror the main dot matrix.
For moving lights, DBN provided 20 Clay Paky Alpha Spot 575 HPEs and 20 Alpha Wash 575 THs, along with 16 Clay Paky Alpha Beam 300 fixtures.
In addition to these, there were about 60 generics – a mix of Source Four profiles, ARRI 2Ks and ADB fresnels, all hung in the air.
The three bar areas around the edges were lit with a selection of Source Four PARs rigged on the overhead trussing.
All lighting in the room was controlled via a Jands Vista T2 console, programmed and run by Kennett, which also triggered the Hippotizer.
The ends of the catwalks were each flanked by a 2-metre PufferSphere complete with 360 degree projection system, which moved in and out to different positions during the evening on points rigged by DBN.
DBN's crew of 10 worked in shifts alongside six local riggers for the load-in, which started midnight on the Monday night/Tuesday morning, to be ready for the show on Wednesday evening.
This is an annual event on which DBN has worked previously in locations all over Europe. Andy Kennett noted, "The schedule was tough, but thorough pre-planning and preparation plus some amazing teamwork between all on site ensured that the end results looked stunning."
For more information, please visit www.dbn.co.uk.
