Essential Lighting has supplied award winning production company Ten Alps Events with 36 Ireos Pro 7 Kw Space Cannons for a daring high-impact festive lighting scheme running the length of Oxford Street. Commissioned by end client The New West End Company, the scheme is a total departure from any previous more traditional incarnations of the Oxford Street lights.
Once the idea was approved, Ten Alps approached lighting designer Andy Grant, asking if he could come up with an imaginative, eye-catching master plan involving searchlights. Essential had worked with Ten Alps last year on elements of the "Brightening Up London" event – and so they were an obvious choice as lighting provider, with Martin Lubach as project manager.
The result is nine 7-metre high ESS gantries - designed to allow clearance for double decker bus underneath - spanning Oxford Street, spread out from the Centre Point/Tottenham Court Road end to Marble arch. Each one is loaded with four Space Cannons and a 100 KVA Cat generator.
The lights received their celebrity switch on last night, and have already been hailed as a spectacular success and an instant hit with those using the street and others in and around the capitol. The lights can be seen for vantage points all over the city.
The get-in was arduous, taking 2 weeks of continuous overnight work. Apart from being one of the busiest roads in London, the production crews worked with only partial road closures between 11 and 5 a.m. The gantries – clad by Media structures - took two nights to erect, with the lights already strapped onto their bridge sections to save time. Once these were in all place, the gennies were craned onboard.
The lights were programmed on a Hog PC and are run off a Jands Hog 1000 console, situated in 3rd floor offices near Gantry 6 opposite Debenhams. Now operational, the system is minded by two crew, with the lights on a pre-programmed loop throughout the night. This also includes some special sequences that coincide with audio cues – one for Heather Small's "Proud" – when the lights go into Olympic colours and do special movements, and there's also a Harry Potter sample with it's own lighting sequence. The music is blasted out of two of the gantries that are fitted with speakers, supplied by Dimension Audio.
eDMX Control Solution
Control was a major challenge. Obviously running wired data to that many searchlights over this distance and urban terrain was out of the question, so Essential enlisted wireless data consultant Chris Crockford from dAFTdATA. Crockford designed and produced a specially adapted solution using standard components from Essential's Avolites' eDMX radio system.
Utilising special directional polarised antennas to boost the signal to the ESTI limits for powered transmission, the 1.9 Km eDMX string is arguably the longest short term installed radio DMX system in the world to date.
Data transmission is split into four zones covering the 9 gantries, allowing the physical radio frequency to be changed to avoid the other 40 odd other wireless networks along Oxford Street!
The height of the gantries aides this process, as the transmitters are near the top of the trees, and therefore able to fire through this notorious interceptor of wireless signal!
Two eDMX transmitters sit back in the office. The signal is split at Bridge 6 and sent in both directions - up and down - Oxford Street, encoding and decoding along the way to avoid other frequencies.
Crockford was also involved in developing software for an audio 'black box' solution for the sound samples, which are triggered by DMX off a fader on the lighting desk!
