The ship plies one of P&O's most popular routes - three-day mini-cruises between Portsmouth and Bilbao, capital of the Basque region of northern Spain. The complete installation had to be carried out during one such cruise - and even during a gale-force storm.
LBI was asked to design a new lighting system for the 700-seat Silverstone Lounge, the Pride of Bilbao's multi-function entertainment suite which hosts a multitude of different events including speech-based entertainment, live theatre shows with a band, discos, club nights, game shows, cabaret and full production musical shows. The system was installed and commissioned in October 2004.
The brief included replacing most of the existing lighting and repairs to some of the installed equipment, as well as efficiency improvements to reduce both power consumption and ongoing maintenance costs. Like the new audio system, the lighting rig also had to be simple to operate reliably by the ship's entertainment staff, with most of each show's cues pre-programmed and played back automatically from timecode. "The most significant changes we made," says LBI director Roland Hemming, "were actually the physical changes - we wanted the venue to look more theatrical and for the stage to look more exciting with dynamic lighting."
The resulting changes included removing an old starcloth that formed the stage backdrop and replacing it with a solid wall mounted with LED fittings to create a starcloth effect with much lower power and maintenance costs, plus the installation of Howard Eaton Lighting (HELL) LED stage light fittings. "The benefits of LED lighting on board ship are even more obvious than on dry land," says Hemming, "including low power, long life, low maintenance, versatility and high brightness."
Next, to surround performers with light on either side, LBI built two 'light walls', each faced with a dozen Pulsar Chromaflash LED modules and fitted with concealed, integral smoke ducting to duct smoke onto stage from a safe distance. All the FOH Par cans were replaced with Source Four Pars - the ETC fixtures' high efficiency halving the rig's power requirements at a stroke, while dramatically increasing light levels onstage. The new rig was rounded off with a pair of Martin MAC 250 moving heads.
In command of the rig is a Hog 500 control desk with Wholehog II v3 operating system, controlling the lighting directly from each show's timecode. One of the few elements of the original rig to be retained was the ceiling-mounted Arc Line, for which LBI designed a custom interface, allowing it to be run from the Hog via DMX instead of the previous standalone controller.
"Then," adds Hemming, "there was the whole challenge of getting the installation done. It had to be done while the ship was operational, so - unseen by any of the passengers - we carried out the entire work on one three-day mini cruise, working overnight for three nights from about 2am to mid-day each day. The entire fit-up including fabrication and re-rigging was done in a total of 30 hours. The fact that we were at sea meant we had to be completely self-contained, with no margin for error and no possibility of calling back to the office for extra parts or tools, so our preparation had to be extremely exacting.
"And to cap it all, on the second night out in the Bay of Biscay there was a Force 9 gale. We had to work right through it in order to meet the schedule, because over-running would have entailed bringing the entire team back for another three-day cruise, thus doubling our labour budget and inconvenienci
