Showcore and Elation on ice at St. Paul carnival
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This year’s celebration was especially well attended as it happened to coincide with the throngs of guests in the area to celebrate the 2018 Super Bowl. The St Paul Festival and Heritage Foundation of Minnesota brought event production company Showcore in to design and run the event’s nightly light shows, which included illumination of a 70ft tall ice palace using Elation Professional IP65-rated lighting.
The massive St Paul Winter Carnival Ice Palace was built out of ice blocks harvested from a lake in Minnesota and constructed in Rice Park in downtown St. Paul.
Showcore used Elation SixBar 1000 IP LED battens within the structure to glow the palace walls; IP65-rated Proteus Beam moving heads to shoot moving pillars of light from the tops of the towers; and Arena Zoom Q7 IP PAR colour changers to uplight elaborate ice sculptures carved throughout the run of show. Josh Wabaunsee of Showcore served as lead lighting designer on the project.
Showcore is based locally in the Twin Cities area and has worked with the Winter Carnival for the last four years, this year handling everything from lighting plot design to programming, installation, and nightly board operation. “Our role was to make the ice palace light up in colourful themed looks depending on the celebration of the night, and to provide scheduled time-coded light shows to pre-recorded songs that would play in the park,” stated Showcore’s Chris LeBlanc. “We were also responsible for lighting sponsor signs and banners, as well as all of the ice sculptures that are carved over the course of the second week.”
The SixBar 1000 IPs were mounted to the scaffolding inside the ice palace’s tower walls along ground level and used to uplight the inside of the ice blocks. “Any time there was a change in architecture, such as the second and third inner layers of the tall towers, we added another layer of SixBars inside to uplight that layer of ice,” said LeBlanc.
Showcore also incorporated effects from Elation’s award-winning Proteus Beam moving head, 2-degree beam lights that also carry a fully weatherproof IP65 rating. The narrow beam effects were used to project animated pillars of light from the tops of the ice palace’s six towers.
One of the biggest draws of the St Paul Winter Carnival is the ice carving contests, where carvers create amazing and intricate statues out of ice blocks over the course of several days. Some of the carvers are outside for days in temperatures close to zero degrees to carve their designs in time. At night, Showcore used the Arena Zoom Q7 IP colour changers to uplight the sculptures and add dramatic colour to the pieces. “We needed a powerful fixture with RGB colour flexibility that could light a large sculpture using only one or two fixtures while contributing to the artist’s scene.”
(Jim Evans)
