ETC London helps Rock Cashel for St Patrick’s Day
For the first time ever, Ireland's primary St Patrick's Day spectacular event moved out of Dublin and to picturesque Cashel in County Tipperary, for a live Saturday night prime time broadcast on RTE 1.
The 'Skyfest' event has traditionally been a fireworks show, but this year, Donal Sheils, chief executive of the St Patrick's Day Committee, decided the time was right to add some additional visual elements to the spectacle as well as shifting it to a charismatic site-specific location.
Peter Canning from Dublin-based design company High Resolution Lighting and Ross Ashton from ETC London approached Sheils after last year’s festival with the idea that they came onboard for 2008 as lighting and projection designer respectively. Their proposal was to create a mixed-media show – along with pyro – that could be staged at the Rock of Cashel.
Ashton devised an original storyboard for the projection, including symbols, images and texturing, based on the Rock's rich history which dates back to the 12th century.
The majority of buildings at the summit of the Rock of Cashel’s current site date from the 12th and 13th centuries, the earliest being the distinctive Round Tower. Cashel itself, however, dates back much further and is reputedly the site of the conversion of the King of Munster by St. Patrick in the 5th century A.D. The buildings have a complex mass and outline rivalling other Celtic art and medieval architecture sites in Western Europe.
The whole collection has a unique, native ambience and is one of the most remarkable collections of Celtic art and medieval architecture in Europe, so is an ideal site for a St Patrick’s Day celebration in many ways.
A prime viewing area at the foot of the rock was negotiated for 40,000 people to enjoy impressive views of the event.
Despite the distinctly historic setting, and the need to keep it tasteful and appropriate, Canning and Ashton proposed that the lighting and projection show injected some rock ‘n’ roll “attitude” into the whole presentation. The final format of the show was not fully agreed upon until a few weeks beforehand, at which time a music track was compiled by Dublin-based DJ Mark McCabe and London-based Karen Monid.
ETC has worked on some unusual and interesting sites in its time, and Ross Ashton describes the Rock of Cashel as hitting all the tick boxes for a great show. “Incredible: amazing architecture, lots of idiosyncrasies, not to mention a perfect – and challenging – location.”
He came up with several design ideas for the space at the initial planning stages, from which they chose to go with the black and white images. Ashton says, “Creatively, that’s been the exciting part of it for me! I have had to think very carefully in terms of the images I’ve chosen and the information they will convey”.
The projection content very much reflected the music – lots of Celtic patterns – a mix of abstract and geometric. The music was extremely dynamic and diverse – from U2 and Sinead O’Connor, to ancient Celtic folk, allowing Ashton to take advantage of the whole palette of different movements and tricks offered by the four PIGI rotating double scroller projectors lined up onto the four main walls of the Castle.
The 6kW PIGIs were positioned in close proximity to the Castle – about 25 metres away – with 22 cm lenses and containing approximately 10 metres of film in each double rotating scroller.
The Xenon white of the PIGIs also proved to be a good continuity match with the Xenon of the 10K and 6K Synchrolites used to back light and internally light the Castle.
The PIGI show was programmed and run by Erlwin de Gans via ETC’s proprietary OnlyCue system. Rounding out the crew were ETC London’s Richard Porter and Paul Highfield, who handled the equipment installation and the logistics respectively.
| Click on the pictures for the large version |
