Nick Ho Adds New Dimensions to G12 Asia Conference with ChamSys

As time passes, events and the lighting designers who work for them year after year often seem to develop a shared sense of how to approach the job at hand. Such is the case of Nick Ho and the G12 Asia conference. The Singapore-based lighting designer began working for the massive worship rally in 2005 and has lit every one of its annual conferences since 2016.

Like his client, which is constantly looking for new ways to engage worshippers, Ho refuses to rest on his laurels. Although his big, multi-faceted lightshows have earned widespread praise from the conference's attendees and its technical director, Dennis Thien, Ho is always working to make them more compelling. This year, he and his programmer Justin Poh upped the engagement level by doing something they'd never done before: pixel map their rig's washes.

Creating this new design with the 78 wash fixtures in their rig was made much easier, they say, by the pixel mapping features in their ChamSys MagicQ MQ100 Pro. "This was the first time that we have tried pixel mapping washes for such a large scale event," says Ho, noting that the conference, which was held at the Singapore Expo Hall, drew 10,000 people. "The pixel mapping functions in our ChamSys works very fast, which was good, because Justin wound up creating looks on site during the conference.

"Pixel mapping the washes added another dimension to our show," continues Ho. "Having the simple low-res animation effects run across the back line truss created very engaging looks. Doing this was a straightforward process with ChamSys. We just had to create a fixture layout in the Output Window View Plan, create the grid size, and assign heads correctly into the boxes, then patch PIXMAP -- and we were done! The ease of working with ChamSys removes a lot of stress when you are trying something new."

Ho was also impressed with how smoothly his console worked with the different brands of washes in his rig. "We had three different brands represented, almost evenly," he says. "It was quite a task to make sure we had the correct color balances across this diverse rig. This was especially important because we had to watch our colors for our video cameras."

Ho and Poh had 409 fixtures run across 24 universes in their lighting design for the conference. Their lighting filled a variety of roles, requiring a versatile system, and a flexible attitude on their part.

"As always, we try to balance the important creative aspect of lighting design with the practical 'light first' concept," says Ho. "I tried to make use of the correct timing during worship segment to enhance the stage and the surrounding environment. At the same time, we wanted lighting to reach the audience, and work well for the cameras. There were times when we would turn off stage wash to create a back-light silhouette effect without losing anything for the camera. There were always many different demands to weigh, so having a console that simplified things was very important."

In addition to the MagicQ MQ100 Pro, Ho and Poh ran their lights on a Maxi Wing with a MacBook Pro. A custom designed MIDI Controller was also used.

"This year, I introduced MIDI wing hardware to be used with MQ100 as an 'extra fader wing,'" says Ho. "This wing sent MIDI output to ChamSys. There is a very useful Automation feature in ChamSys that allows you to assign any MIDI input command to trigger cues. For G12, I assigned it to trigger a 'Executor Window.' This wing helped Justin and me trigger as many effects as possible without losing our concentration during busking moments, which were different and more elaborate this year."

Whether it's pixel mapping washes for the first time, or pushing his busking envelope, Ho continues to expand his creative horizons with his ChamSys console at the G12 Asia conference -- and his client couldn't be happier.