Architects John Gribble Pty Ltd designed a functional space with the assistance of theatre consultants Entertech and electrical engineers Adrian Newman & Associates. With 16 years' experience in the industry, Lightmoves was contracted to provide lighting and audio visual infrastructure throughout both venues. Before work commenced on site, Lightmoves created shop drawings showing cable routes and types for the electrical contractors. This included cables for DMX (consisting of three sets of two universes of input, and 20 DMX outlet locations), Ethernet (cable termination to 15 locations), paging, intercom, house lighting control, video and show relay.
As the theatrical lighting outlets onstage needed to be relocatable, 50mm circuit tubing was used. The 6m long pre-wired bars were fixed to the scenery batons allowing distributed power to any bar. The fan-out was then patched to LSC iPRO dimmers as required. Each of the theatres contained eight bars with an impressive total of 96 outlets.
Lightmoves also designed and built a stage manager's console featuring an all-steel frame, large lockable castors, a cable harness, a flip-up lid and double doors underneath. The customised console was also home to a Creative Audio C120 intercom master station, an audience recall tone button, a digital countdown / timer, and a Littlite gooseneck task light. The intercom master feeds two talkback loops of intercom that can be accessed at any of the 27 intercom points located throughout the building. To enable cast and crew to hear the stage sound show relay, a Shure SM89 Microphone was mounted on the number one lighting bridge.
Communication with the public areas, such as the foyers, gallery and ticket box, was made possible through the use of a high quality paging system using JBL Control24 speakers, Australian Monitor amplifiers and a Peavey Digitool processor.
Lightmoves' final task was to create global lighting control for the four distinct systems of lighting - audience / foyer lights, on-stage work lights, on-stage blue working lights and general backstage lighting. This was implemented using Dynalite architectural dimmers controlled by an easy-to-use push button panel located on the stage managers console.
(Lee Baldock)
