Event production company Harry The Hirer Productions supplied 20 of its new Robe ESPRITE LED profile moving lights to the recent 2-day APAC ‘confluence’ event for Indian multinational business consulting and IT specialist InfoSys.
The conference was staged at the Glasshouse, Olympic Park, Melbourne, and coincided with the finals of the 2020 Australian Open (AO) Tennis tournament. It highlighted InfoSys’s role as Digital Innovation Partner to the AO, and its enterprise uniting leading minds in business, technology and education to deliver novel, collaborative responses to some of the “great questions” of our time.
The Glasshouse is an interesting contemporary space, and a place familiar to Harry The Hirer Productions event teams who supplied all production elements including furniture, signage and décor as well as all the straight technical disciplines – audio, lighting, video, staging and rigging.
The APAC Confluence main plenary session was in the venue’s largest space which has floor-to-ceiling windows along one side, which were tastefully blocked with a series of large shades.
| Lighting was specified by the project management team at Harry The Hirer Productions including operation manager Ian Kirkwood |
The ESPRITES were chosen for all the reasons that Harry The Hirer Productions made the investment in the first place – their small size, high CRI, beautiful light quality, accurate shuttering and excellent colour mixing.
Fourteen of the 20 x ESPRITES were installed on two roof trusses running down the centre of the room, with six behind the 4-metre diameter circular stage, which was in front of a stylish 16-meter curved LED wide-screen at the back that completed the streamlined modern look.
Lighting was programmed and operated for the event by Marcello “Cello” Mandrino, who was using ESPRITES for the first time. He had a very limited time between the get-in early that morning and when the room had to be handed over to the client for rehearsals and his first impressions of the fixtures were overwhelmingly positive.
Lighting the stage was a challenge with the venue’s low ceiling and the large expanse of LED at the back. It was all about key lighting presenters in flattering skin tones without light bleeding onto the screen, so the shutters were essential.
“It’s always exciting to use any new technology for the first time! I’d seen the ESPRITE demo’d at the roadshow a couple of months earlier, but that was very different from using them in a real scenario”
He utilised gobos softened with frost for a subtle steel blue breakup over the audience and the blinds down the sides of the room, where the dappled effects were very effective and enabled the presenters to see the audience but not be right in their faces.
The plenary sessions were live-streamed and recorded on camera, so 3200K was the goal for key lighting “which the ESPRITE achieved effortlessly” both from overhead and the fixtures on the floor at the back which produced a nice warm glow around the speakers.
The presentations all contained multiple graphics, so Cello used his vast experience of lighting events like this to balance the static lighting looks for each presenter to match the backdrop slides running throughout their presentation.
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Much of the time, the ESPRITES used for front key-lighting were run only at 20-30% intensity |
Cello concluded that having the ESPRITES on the event meant that he could light the session it more efficiently, get better looks in the short timeframe enabling and work faster as a result to get cues into the grandMA2 console.
Cello works full time for Harry The Hirer Productions, usually based in their Sydney branch, and is now using Robe products again regularly as the company has purchased ESPRITES and MegaPointes.