DBN Delivers in Dublin at RDS

Manchester, UK, based DBN Lighting designed and supplied the lighting scheme plus all associated trussing and rigging equipment and crew rig for a gala dinner accommodating 900 people at Dublin's RDS.

DBN was working for creative communications agency WRG; the event was the national field sales conference for a leading international pharmaceutical company.

The lighting rig was designed and the event project-managed for DBN by Andy Kennett. The main challenge was to devise a rigging system to suspend a 8' dot pitch grid consisting of over 200 Pulsar ChromaSpheres above the audience in addition to a large number of moving and generic lights, which brought the total roof loading to 15 tons.

The loading constraints were 8, 047lbs per point, and the time scale for the get in and technical build was very short.

Working alongside the venue's structural engineer and WRG technical production manager Stuart Greaves, Kennett designed a truss system that was distributed over 90 points to achieve the technical requirements and comply with the structural constraints.

The client's new branding was based on dots, hence the matrix of ChromaSpheres, which made a great visual impact and provided a theme for the whole event. The lighting brief was to create an atmosphere and a pleasant, visually interesting environment, complete with theatricality that was also comfortable for guests to enjoy dinner and conversation as well as lighting the stage for the show.

In the center of the room was a circular stage, with two catwalks to facilitate the evening's entertainment, which included a "Riverdance" style Celtic dancing show.

Due to the tight load in and limited roof loadings, it was not possible to lift a single mother grid, so the lateral solution was to construct the sphere matrix in sections and fly each one out as the crew worked across the space. Each section comprised two parallel 52.5' runs of Slick MiniBeam trussing bridged with scaff. Twenty-eight dots were then suspended from each of these on 10' drop wires.

The result was an eye-catching sea of color changing dots, which were pixel-mapped through DBN's Green Hippo Hippotizer media server and fed with a variety of content. The LED table centers were also mapped through the Hippotizer so effects could mirror the main dot matrix.

For moving lights, 20 Clay Paky Alpha Spot 575 HPE and 20 Alpha Wash 575 TH units were specified. There were also 16 CP Alpha Beam 300 fixtures.

In addition to these, there were about 60 generics - a mix of ETC Source Four profiles, ARRI 2Ks and ADB Fresnels, all hung in the air.

The three-bar areas around the edges were lit with a selection of Source Four PARs rigged on the overhead trussing.

All lighting in the room was controlled via a Jands Vista T2 console, programmed and run by Kennett, which also triggered the Hippotizer.

The ends of the catwalks were each flanked by a 6.5' PufferSphere complete with 360-degree projection system, which moved in and out to different positions during the evening on points rigged by DBN.

DBN's crew of 10 worked in shifts alongside six local riggers for the load-in which commenced at midnight on the Monday night/Tuesday morning, to be ready for the show on Wednesday evening.

This is an annual event on which DBN has worked previously in locations all over Europe. Andy Kennett comments, "The schedule was tough, but thorough pre-planning and preparation plus some amazing teamwork between all on site ensured that the end results looked stunning."