The project was produced for Marks & Spencer by consultancy Hotcakes and designed by Darren Parker of DPL Production Lighting, who worked closely with High Wycombe-based AC Lighting and Avolites to achieve the desired effect.
The external scheme included six Studio Due CityColor architectural luminaires. These dramatically illuminated the neo-deco façade of the M&S building - itself a particularly striking piece of modern architecture surrounded by office buildings on all sides - and provided contrasting and complementing colours to those utilized inside.With weight restrictions preventing any lights being located on the actual M&S building, and with busy streets below, these fully weatherised units had to be mounted on the roof of an office building on the opposite side of the road and controlled from a lighting console located within the main building.
The solution - devised by AC Lighting - required signals which could be transmitted reliably across the required distance within a given budget, using Artistic Licence, Net-Link I/P and Net-Link O/P Ethernet-to-DMX512 converters that were interfaced to ELSA LANCOM L-11 Wireless Ethernet Adapters. The Net-Link I/P took in DMX data from the lighting console and converted it into Ethernet using the Art-Net protocol. The Ethernet data was then transmitted across the road using a pair of ELSA 2 LANCOM L-11 Wireless Ethernet transceivers operating at 2.4gHz. A Net-Link O/P unit then converted the data back into DMX data, distributed to the different floors via Avolites splitters, using cable in the traditional manner. The solution has the ability to transmit the signals up to 400 metres in line-of-sight applications.
Parker took advantage of the reflective white interiors of five of the building’s unoccupied floors by using them for the location of further fixtures. The ensuing mirror effect resulted in shafts of richly saturated colours shooting across vast areas and out of the windows, changing colour every few seconds and focused to avoid blinding the surrounding offices with light.
The third, fourth and seventh floors featured seven CityColors per floor, plus six Martin MAC 500s, the latter used for snowflake gobo patterns, break-ups and texturing. The fifth and sixth floors each housed a single CityColor, focused out of the front of the building. Parker selected an Avolites Pearl 2000 console for the core lighting control: situated on the third floor, this enabled the nightly early evening lightshow to run like a live show, overseen in turn by crew members Chris Doy and Andy Higgins from both interior and exterior locations.
"The project has been a great success," explained Darren Parker, "and I am particularly pleased with the wireless Ethernet link carrying the DMX data. It’s so stable, it really is hard to believe that it’s not running through a cable. It beats the hell out of digging up the road!"
