zactrack in control for UAE National Day
- Details
The show was directed by Francisco Negrin, Gavin Robins & Bryn Walters, with lighting for this high-profile production designed by Bruno Poet, with associate designers Max Narula & Johanne Jensen.
A special tunnel shaped auditorium was designed by Es Devlin specially curated for the location at ADNEC in Abu Dhabi. The epic 45-minute show featured a full-scale parade and a stylishly choreographed cast of over 3000, including 1000 military personnel and 1000 children, which highlighted the history, values, achievements, and future visions of the UAE.
This fusion of colour, movement and drama was broadcast and streamed live on the first day of the 2022 UAE National Day holiday weekend.
Bruno’s starting point for the lighting design was the detailed scenic environment and Francisco’s carefully storyboarded narrative. Bruno specified a lighting rig that was versatile enough to cover the show dynamics and the impressive 100m-long by 20m-wide performance area. It featured giant curved portals at both ends with opening / closing doors for entrances / exits. The entire space including the floor was also used as a projection surface.
Ground supported lighting positions surrounded the entire venue, matched to the gentle curves of the outdoor setting, with seating stands either side and a ‘ceiling’ made up from 14 x 100m-long ROE Strip video products attached to catenaries.
Around 3,800 lighting fixtures were patched in total, 436 of which were calibrated and linked to the fully redundant zactrack PRO tracking system chosen by Bruno and Max, with 22 x Anchors (antennas) mapping the designated area and 75 x Tags (trackers).
Lighting being zactracked included powerful Elation Maximus and Robe Forte luminaires follow-spotting principal artists throughout the show. The Fortes were run manually by human operators working with the zactrack system which was controlling the intensities and other parameters, unlocking an impressive combination for superlative key lighting.
“We needed a highly accurate and reliable option to really tightly control key lighting, not just to highlight performers but to ensure minimal light spillage onto the projection surfaces, so they had maximum impact,” explained Bruno.
The zactrack system was also utilised to intensity track the location of objects without the lights moving, using a mix of Ayrton and Elation fixtures that captured the numerous parade floats as they passed along the 2km route. This was possible via zactrack’s MSC zoning feature, programmed to automatically trigger the appropriate lights and control the intensities of these fixtures as the floats (or objects) passed by one of 54 zones, which was a clean and streamlined process.
“The system worked brilliantly for this job, and it was extremely quick to set up and finesse,” commented Max.
The National Day event’s technical integrator was Encore Dubai who sourced and supplied the zactrack system together with all the lighting equipment.
Lighting was run via four grandMA3s with three grandMA3 lights as backup/tech. The three main ones with their requisite backups ran the show lighting; Jon Barker was programming and tech’ing the zactrack Trackers on one console, while Max looked after the main lighting fixtures on the second, with the third run by Dan Bond programming the vast amounts of LED strip in the venue in conjunction with a d3 server, which also received zactrack data via OSC.
The Organising Committee of the 51 National Day Celebrations was headed by creative executive producer and Rawdha Al Qubasi, artistic director Ayesha Hadhir, and in addition to Encore, other production suppliers and consultants were Wonder Works, Stage One, Cundall Engineering, Al Laith, Creative Technology, Maestra, VK Scenic, Agora and Clair.
