White Light was delighted to team up once again with lighting designer Phil Supple and with Midas Productions for The Mill Project, which used lighting to bring life to the landmark Tower at Cranfield’s Mill in Ipswich in Suffolk, east-England.The Mill Project was part of the Ip-Art 2010 arts festival organised by Ipswich Borough Council; as part of the festival, Midas Productions asked Phil Supple to develop a centrepiece lighting project, building on the collaboration the two have enjoyed over three years of the Northumberland Lights project as well as the Iconic Burns project in Scotland, both of which were also supplied by White Light. Phil Supple explains: “the only parameters offered were a desire by the Council to create a focus of interest on the town and the festival, and on the waterfront in particular.”
Supple’s proposed scheme involved using lighting to animate and draw attention to The Tower at Cranfield’s Mill, an award-winning building designed by John Lyall Architects which is at the heart of Ipswich’s waterfront re-development. The lighting designer’s intention was to light the building from within, providing dynamic shifts and waves of colour and light up its entire height, while also using some external lighting to highlight the architecture and draw attention to the show. The light show would run from 10pm to 2am each night, designed to accompany a soundtrack composed by Toby Park replayed through local radio or available as a download to enable visitors to listen to it on their own MP3 players while watching the show – this including a countdown sequence to allow visitors to synchronise their player to the start of the lighting.
To realise his plan, Phil Supple worked with Dave Isherwood and his team at White Light to find the most suitable lighting fixtures, settling on the Vari-Lite VLX LED washlight to light the interior of the building, sixteen of the fixtures installed on floors throughout the building able to light out through the Tower’s feature windows both directly and in dramatic sweeping movement patterns. “The VLXs really made the show,” Supple notes, “being fast, reliable, lightweight and extremely bright. Their low power consumption was also key, as the entire event was supplied from within the building itself. The richness of colour they give, their speed of strobing, their cool running and their brightness make them an all-round winner as far as I’m concerned.”
To light the outside of the building, Supple used ten Vari-Lite VL3000 Spots to light its facades, and three Clay Paky Alpha Beam 1500s on the roof to provide searchlight effects in the air to draw attention to the show. The show was controlled using a grandMA MA Light console, data distributed using MANet on cat-5 cable before being converted back to DMX using MA’s NSP network nodes. The show was programmed by Jim Beagley.
“Jim and I worked off-line with the MA visualiser and Toby Park’s fantastic soundtrack for three days at White Light, which let us program the majority of the show’s content,” Phil Supple explains, noting that “White Light were the perfect partners for this event, providing the whole pre-production and technical package with their customary efficiency, reliability and no-fuss approach.”
The fit-up then took four days from load-in to opening night, this overseen by the team from Midas Productions including producer & production manager David Noble, lighting crew chief Chris Vickers and site electrician Andy Dann. “We then had two nights of lighting to create a timed sequence that ran to clock each night, with the piece itself repeating six times each hour.”
The result was a well received centrepiece to the Ip-Art festival. “The reaction has been very positive from all quarters,” Phil Supple notes. “Nobody had seen anything like this before. It has certainly renewed interest in the building, has clearly raised awareness of and interest in site-specific digital artwork, and has served as a great event to launch the festival.”
Further information about Ipswich’s Ip-Art Festival, including video of The Mill Project, can be found at http://www.ip-art.com. Further information about lighting designer Phil Supple can be found at www.lightrefreshment.co.uk, and about Midas Productions at www.midas-uk.co.uk.