Related Stories:
Avolites at The National Theatre
Avolites launches eDMX - a new wireless control solution.
Avolites at the Rio Carnival 2004
“All Eyes on London” - a New Year visual spectacular

“All Eyes on London” - a New Year visual spectacular uses new Avolites Radio DMX Product.

“All Eyes On London” was a lighting and visual spectacular set around the British Airways London Eye, designed to put London on the New Year’s Eve celebratory events map. The aim was to create a show comparable with cities such as Sydney, Paris, Lisbon, Athens, all renowned for producing awesome displays for New Year.

The results spoke for themselves!

Lighting Designer Gary Collins was asked to create a dazzling lighting scheme for the London Eye, to compliment a three-and-a-half minute firework spectacular.

The lighting scheme broke technical ground in several ways, the most ambitious being first time use of the new Avolites’ E-DMX radio DMX product. E-DMX was used to stream 33 strings of DMX between the controller and fixtures on, in and around the Eye.

Technical Challenges

Lighting the Eye for the event was a massive challenge for Collins, who wanted to tie in specific lighting effects exactly to some of the pyro cues, so it was vital that the (separate) control and timing for the two mediums was spot on. He also wanted to add additional colour and movement to the show, highlight its elegant architectural integrity, and ensure the lighting effects were also noticed amidst the obvious WOW factor of the fireworks.

Additional technical obstacles that had to be dealt with were (1) Lighting control for the in-capsule fixtures without creating a cabling nightmare (2) Powering the fixtures once inside the Eye’s 32 capsules and (3) rigging them in and getting them out of the capsules for the 5-night technical period. All fixtures had to be removed by a specific time every night, allowing the capsules to be cleaned and ready for public use each day!

Avolites E-DMX Radio Control

When Collins undertook the job, he asked Martin Lubach to investigate the available radio control options – keen to avoid having to run thousands of DMX cables to the capsule fixtures!

Lubach’s research led him to dAFTdATA’s Chris Crockford, development manager for the project now being marketed as Avolites’ E-DMX after a PLASA 03 preview.

The system is designed around dAFTdATA’s HILDA Wireless DMX receiver card, which uses 802.11B Ethernet to transport DMX data wirelessly. Each capsule of the Eye was equipped with a HILDA card encapsulated in a custom housing, which output the DMX required to drive the fixtures. The 32 HILDA cards received the three streams of DMX required to control all 64 capsule lights. Another four Mac 2K profiles at the base of the Eye were also controlled via a separate E-DMX receiver. 

Collins and console operator Phil Cole programmed from a remote position across on the North Bank of the Thames, near the RAF Memorial. For programming, a remote link was set up by dAFTdATA allowing so all 5 DMX universes could be streamed across the Thames. 

The radio DMX was encoded over standard 802.1 Ethernet using dAFTdATA’s WENDI Protocol. When the data reached the control, it split off to two local HILDA receivers to supply the two universes of DMX required for the pontoon mounted VL5Arc™ wash luminaire. The remaining three universes were split off and streamed from two transmission points to form a blanket of coverage, which covered the north face of the London Eye.

The hardest problem facing the E-DMX design team from dAFTdATA was to ensure that the data reached all the capsules in synch across an area of 14,300 square meters, so all the lights responded exactly as programmed – and quickly - keeping pace with frenetic chases around the capsules and other exciting effects.

Tight for Time!

The HILDA cards were encased in custom housing manufactured to provide protection for the electronics whilst allowing maximum reception. The project’s timescale left little time for errors and the cards were fabricated and assembled in the 12 working days running up to Christmas. Full scale testing took place on Boxing Day and programming commenced on the 27th of December.

Although the lighting department theoretically had five overnight periods of ‘technical time’ in the run up, only about 8 hours of this was practically utilisable for programming

Collins comments, “Overall the radio DMX was the most vital and also the trickiest element of the job.” 

Success

The event itself was a major success for the GLA. It attracted huge international media interest and created a festive atmosphere in central London, with an 100,000 strong crowd enjoying one of London’s iconic sites as never seen before.

The stage is now set to build on the event for future New Year’s Eves in London.

All photos are © Louise Stickland