ADJ illuminates Lone Star Lights
- Details
Established in 2002, Carolina Creek offers overnight summer youth camps as well as year-round retreat facilities for churches, youth organizations and civic organisations, as well as corporate team building events. Hosting thousands of young people in the summer and busy most of the rest of the year, the holiday season has historically been a quiet time for the camp. Therefore, Lone Star lights was brought to life to utilise the site during the downtown and simultaneously rise funds for the organisation which awards hundreds of scholarships each year to campers from urban/inner city communities.
Running for its second season in 2023, Lone Star Lights took place select nights each week from the last Friday in November through Friday 22 December. The huge walkthrough experience featured over a million Christmas lights spread across 17 acres and arranged into a series of thematic zones. From classic Christmas scenes to Texas-inspired designs, the Insta-worthy light displays sat alongside a series of interactive experiences. These included wrangler-led trail rides, a petting farm with 40+ animals, a 6000 sq.ft light maze, a Candy Cane Lane complete with the scent of peppermint, a zip line, a high ropes course, and three performance stages featuring live music and dance presentations.
Lone Star Lights also featured a larger-than-life nativity: a specially-commissioned 9-piece nativity set which visitors were encouraged to walk around to discover excerpts from the Christmas story told from the perspective of the various different characters.
Another key attraction was the Snow Zone, where approximately 40,000lbs of ice was trucked in daily, shredded and blown on to a sledding hill and interactive play area where kids of all ages were encouraged to enjoy friendly snowball fights! Meanwhile, younger visitors were enthralled by Rolly The Talking Reindeer. This custom-made animatronic was able to see and hear, allowing direct interaction with guests.
To illuminate the various communal areas and themed zones of Lone Star Lights, Carolina Creek invested in a significant quantity of ADJ’s IP65-rated HEX IP Series of robust and versatile LED wash fixtures. 7P HEX IP, 12P HEX IP and 18P HEX IP pars were all utilised to up-light trees and decorative elements as well as to illuminate paths and communal areas. In addition, 32 HEX Panel IP and 15 HEX BAR IP panel and linear fixtures were also utilised, with their zone control feature used to add interest through programmed colour chase sequences.
The only entertainment lighting fixtures that are permanently installed at Carolina Creek are COB Cannon Washes, which are utilised as house lights in one of the camp’s worship centres, and a collection of HEX IP Series wash units, which are used to illuminate the Aerial Park high ropes course to allow late night use during the camp season. The rest of the camp’s fixtures are deployed in different locations and for different purposes during Lone Star Lights than for the summer camps and other events throughout the year.
This flexibility and diversity of use was an important consideration that informed the purchasing decision, as Carolina Creek’s director of creative, production & digital services, Wes Armstrong, explains: “One of the things we really looked for when choosing the lighting fixtures for Lone Star Lights was versatility. It doesn’t make sense for us as an organisation - both financially and in terms of our value of good stewardship - to sit on equipment and not use it for 320 days of the year.
“So, everything had to be IP-rated and have a dual purpose, so that it could be used for Lone Star Lights but also redeployed across the park for camps and other special events at different times of the year. The extreme versatility offered by the ADJ fixtures we selected is phenomenal. Not only can we make use of them all year round, it allows us to reimagine what Lone Star Lights might look like from year to year as we’re not stuck in a box because we purchased fixtures for specific purposes, instead we purchased a lighting toolkit that has infinite possibilities.”
