Splendour in the Grass 2016

Aahh the big festival freight train comes rolling through and spreads our gear across a large field for a week. The team worked extra hard to pull this off and i feel very grateful for them and the lengths they go to to make shit happen. It didn't help that the event overlapped with our largest corporate gig to date - Jaguars F-Pace car launch at Elements of Byron.

This year, like the last 2 years, we've been responsible for lighting the main venues in the Global Village, which is an alternative hub within the festival featuring massage, yoga, Gyuto Monks, body painting just to name a few of the excellently curated things going on here. It's like a mini festival within the festival and due to a new site layout, now lies right in the heart of the grounds. It sure brings the heart too.

This year the Village expanded and a new large World Music stage was a part of the zone. 

Front of house at the new World Music Stage in the Global Village

The new stage entailed pixel mapped projections onto stretched lycra on the front of the stage and the projections were provided by (?).

Also new the the Village was the Bohemian Lounge which was home to a diverse bunch of artists and cabaret performers and was beautifully decked out by Emma Lee-Luther and her team of decor artists. 

The Boho Lounge

The larger scale of the village threw us off a tad and we found ourselves doing extra kilometres on our feet just moving equipment around and finding gear. Definitely a shipping container to centralize our operation next year.

The site and stage lighting for the village was a big job in itself and took 4 of us 3 days to install and tidy. The next job was to set up our own venue the Electric Garden Silent Disco.

No cables!

New technology is slowly freeing us from the cables so entrenched in our industry. Now the reality of a battery powered, remote controlled event is here. I can't event believe it. This is truly game changing for the event industry and will allow creative lighting designers the chance to really shine. 

LED technology combined with LIthium-Ion tech is how we are going to cut the ties. Really it makes perfect sense that each lighting fixture has it's own power, negating the need for load calculation, hiding cables, burying cables and single points of failure. If a 3 phase cable fails, the event fails. With new emerging systems each light will have a battery and there are no points of failure like this. 

This is very exciting and will bring more affordable options for smaller weddings and events as labour costs are reduced. Planners will love having a remote control in their pockets and no dangerous electricity to worry about. Venues will love their reduced power bills. Everyone wins. 

The main concern is the dilution of our industry as lighting slowly moves from the technical domain and more into the decor and styling world. We are a few years away from this but as fixtures become more prominent and more easily rigged we may find ourselves with a shifting sand industry. 

battery powered lights.jpg

Blues Fest 2017

The East Coast Blues and Roots music festival in Byron Bay shut the gate on it's 27th year and NCE has for the 4th year in a row provided all the lighting for the bars, coffeshops, food halls and more across the site. 

It's a huge week for our team and there is a considerable amount of planning involved in getting everything installed in the short time frame provided. 

East Coast Blues & Roots music festival Byron Bay 2019

Blues Fest 2019!

We are so lucky here in Byron Bay. Not only are we blessed with magical beaches and weather but we are also visited each year by some of the best musicians in the world over Easter. It’s a time when many locals pull on their gumboots and soak up 5 days of music, fun and food (a little booze too…) and celebrate the end of Summer and the return of some cooler weather.

It’s also a time for us here at NCE to pull all of our resources and strengths together and pull off one of our largest jobs of the year - lighting up the festival grounds, bars, cafes, food halls and more. It’s a huge undertaking and takes a month of preparation, planning and meetings and then 8 days of on-site setup.

The festival really wanted to create a more warmer feel for this year their 30th year so they requested warm white festoon around the edge of each of the music tents - Jamabalaya, Crossroads, Mojo, Delta and Juke Joint. It really brought the structures and site to life and created a safer egress for festival-goers entering in and out of the tents. It also created a beautiful effect on the large LED screens on the side of the stage whenever the cameras turned onto the crowd.

The VIP bar was again hung with our custom made musical instrument pendant lights to pay tribute to the musicians and create a warm and inviting yet classy atmosphere.