DBN Delivers in Dublin

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Manchester, UK, based DBN Lighting designed and supplied a fabulous lighting scheme plus all associated trussing and rigging equipment and crew rig for a gala dinner accommodating 900 people at Dublin's RDS.

DBN was working for creative communications agency WRG and the event was the National Field Sales conference for a leading international pharmaceutical company.

The lighting rig was designed and the event project managed for DBN by Andy Kennett. The main challenge was to devise a rigging system to suspend a 2.5m dot pitch grid consisting of over 200 Pulsar ChromaSpheres above the audience in addition to a large number of moving and generic lights, which brought the total roof loading to 15 tonnes.

The loading constraints were 350Kgs per point, and the timescale for the get in and technical build was very short!

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.

The client's new branding was based on dots, hence the impressive matrix of ChromaSpheres, which made a great visual impact and provided a theme to the whole event. The lighting brief was to create an atmosphere and a pleasant, visually interesting environment, complete with theatricality that was also comfortable for guests to enjoy dinner and conversation as well as lighting the stage for the show.

In the centre of the room was a circular stage, with two catwalks to facilitate the evening's entertainment, which included a Riverdance style Celtic dancing show.

Due to the tight get 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 comprised two parallel 16 metre runs of Slick MiniBeam trussing bridged with scaff. Twenty-eight dots were then suspended from each of these on 3 metre drop wires.

The result was an eye-catching sea of colour changing dots, which were pixel mapped through DBN's Hippotizer media server and fed with a variety of content. The LED table centres were also mapped through the Hippotizer so effects could mirror the main dot matrix.

For moving lights, 20 x Clay Paky Alpha Spot 575 HPE and 20 Alpha Wash 575 TH were specified. There were also 16 CP 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 3 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 6 local riggers for the get in which commenced at 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 comments, "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 press info on DBN Lighting, please contact louise Stickland on +44 7831 329888, +44 1865 202679 or EMail me :[email protected]. To contact DBN direct, please call +44 161 273 4297 or check www.dbn.co.uk.