A suitably cold spring nights finds me, my laptop and various bits of electronics huddled in the passenger seat of a car programming the final effects for the new exterior lighting of The Wyvern Theatre in Swindon. As the local skateboarders departed to their bed’s we we’re just getting into a long night of testing and tweaking each of the effects specified by designer Gudrun Sigriour Haraldsdottir.
Working as subcontractor to Ray Harriss Associates we we’re asked to provide the control of 32 full colour LED lighting strips which wrap around three sides of the building. The typical approach to this type of project is to select an off the shelf DMX controller and use its built in effects. However the effects for the Wyvern Theatre needed to be a cut above the norm, with Gudrun having being bought in to design bespoke effects to ensure the lighting installation would be really impressive. The way to achieve this from an off the shelf controller would be purchase a very expensive controller, which would then need specialist and time consuming programming to achieve the desired effects. Even then the design would need to be adapted to what the controller would provide, instead of what the designer wanted.
My background involves a lot of entertainment industry lighting work, on the design side, as a technician and as a product designer. Having designed a large number of DMX control products over the years for companies in the entertainment technology industry I was able to provide an alternative to the norm. Instead of utilising an off the shelf lighting controller I simply designed one to fit the requirements. This is actually a lot easier than it sounds. Today’s simple microcontrollers are more than able to provide very sophisticated lighting control from a single chip. With the addition of a couple of other components and a few buttons you have all the hardware required.
The bulk of the work was in the design of the software, for which I used standard C code. Providing the effect engines in software is relatively straightforward (or at least it is when you’ve designed as many as I have!) and then it was just a case of providing all the logic and sequencing to produce the requested effects. Whilst this is still time consuming, working at a logic level for an installation of this kind is actually more intuitive than trying to get a standard lighting controller to do the job. Working to the brief of a designer in this way proved really effective, with Gudrun able to concentrate on getting exactly what she wanted and me able to concentrate on designing the code to do the job.
The end result is a really impressive and truely bespoke lighting display with an increadible amount of variety. And the cost, well lets just say we cost significantly less to provide a solution to meet the brief than the purchase of a high end lighting controller and the programing time it would have requried to produce a compromise based solution.
