Proteus Hybrid Endures Frigid Conditions on Swarovski Crystal Worlds Festival of Light

	Photo Credit: Optikalusion

Year after year, in winter, a Festival of Light at Swarovski Crystal Worlds in the Austrian town of Wattens attracts thousands of visitors. The entire park shines and sparkles in a magical interplay of light, music, and crystal and as a recurring highlight guests are treated to a special 15-minute light show.

Swarovski Crystal Worlds allows visitors to experience the wonder of crystal in all its facets. The annual Festival of Light is a breathtakingly spectacular show in which the seven-hectare garden is transformed into a magical luminous atmosphere. This year's event took place from January 18th to February 17th with technology having to endure four weeks of frosty, snowy conditions. With Elation's IP65 Proteus Hybrid made for environments of this type and a record of reliable performance behind it, the all-weather moving head was chosen as the main beam effect in the light show for the second year in a row.

Berlin creative agency StudioNOW was responsible for conception and creative implementation of this year's Festival of Light in cooperation with lighting designer Chris Moylan from Optikalusion and the Spanish artist collective Playmodes. PRG handled the demanding technical implementation. Elation's distribution partner in Germany is LMP.

The attraction's Crystal Cloud, an area made up of around 800,000 hand-mounted Swarovski crystals, was the main arena for the light show. Eight light towers were placed around the Crystal Cloud to which 56 Proteus Hybrids were distributed, seven fixtures per tower. From these positions, the powerful IP65 arc source fixtures provided impressive beam work during the light show. In addition, another six Proteus Hybrid units were used on the Giant, the thematic centerpiece of Swarovski Crystal Worlds.

"The Proteus Hybrid not only provides fantastic beams with sensational long-range effect, it has finally freed us from plastic domes," says Moylan. "Nobody wants to see domes! With the Proteus Hybrid Elation has finally given us a reliable tool to implement fat beam shows outside. Not only did we use the beams, but we also used gobos and prisms to integrate a variety of details into the show."

Outdoors in the bitter cold for four weeks, and at times in massive snowfall, can be a challenge for a weatherproof light, yet Moylan was impressed. "The week I was there, we only had one single outage," he says, "and we were struggling with the worst weather conditions ever. The Proteus Hybrid are extremely reliable, they tolerated very well the extreme conditions and are also very bright. I can only recommend them."