The Fineline team, project managed by Rob Sangwell and co-ordinated onsite by crew chief Ruben Pinkney, used over 1.4km of rope lighting to wire up 80 Tesco shopping trolleys, lamp-posts, bollards and other street furniture plus around 60 individual LED festive decorations - Christmas trees, puddings, Santas etc - so these could be integrated into the show.
The backdrop was a striking 80m wide by 7m high LED video screen for which Immersive produced custom content and animations, which together with the lighting effects, was all set to a specially compiled two-minute soundtrack.
As well as treating the public to a great show, the supermarket giant also used the event to film two Christmas ads - one for viral promotion and one for television.
"We love projects like this," declared Rob Sangwell: "This ticked all our boxes - a bit wacky, challenging and definitely different."
The Fineline team rocked up in Wigan with all the rope lighting, over 140 ways of Avolites dimming, two Avolites Tiger Touch II controllers and five crew. Their networking and DMX wizard Stu England programmed the show initially during four days of lighting pre-production at Fineline's own visualisation suite. Once onsite, England and Greg Haynes, senior software developer from Avolites who provided additional technical support, worked together on the Tiger Touch running it in Multi-User mode so they could work quickly and efficiently.
The fully time-coded show - complete with over 1500 lighting cues executed in two minutes - pushed the system to its limits. The other Fineline crew in Wigan included riggers Ruben Pinkney and Steve Walsh, Rob Watson who oversaw the dimmers and techs Will Dale and Chris Drake. The feature light elements were strategically positioned in a centre cluster in the middle of the 'performance area' in front of the screen.
To create a big Hollywood effect behind the Tesco's sign on the roof outside the front of the shop, five Robe Pointes were installed to its rear. These blasted out once the sign was illuminated and the green Christmas crown popped up right at the end of the show sequence. They also took control of the Tesco's sign via the Tiger Touch.
Fineline were also responsible for all rigging on site including structures to support the video screens.
(Jim Evans)
