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Phil Supple turns to Astera for Edinburgh International Festival’s opening event

UK-based lighting designer Phil Supple utilised 56 Astera Tubes - forty Titans and eight each Hyperion and Helios - to illuminate 137 windows across 57 rooms at the George Heriot School in Edinburgh, Scotland, for “Where to Begin”, the opening event of the 2024 Edinburgh International Festival (EIF).

This EIF production was created by Pinwheel and delivered in partnership with The Macallan, for which Supple worked closely with creative agency Pinwheel under the artistic direction of Katy Fuller and co-director Simon Sharkey, together with composer Roma Yagnik and video artists Yeast Culture.

“Where to Begin” celebrated Scotland’s heritage and mythology as well as the alchemy of invention. The event included an hour-long immersive pre-show experience based on “Rituals that Unite Us” - with fire performers and other live artists. For these two pre-show areas, sixteen Astera AX3s were among other lights deployed for subtle illuminations.

After this, people walked around to the back of the building and gathered to enjoy the projection/son et lumiere finale, with video content mapped and projected onto the school’s north facade by Graymatter Video. The “out-of-the-box” idea of illuminating all possible windows from inside the building was to bring an additional layer of depth and three dimensionality to the event.

The Astera Tubes were supplied by locally based lighting rental specialist Black Light, together with the event’s other lighting equipment. Supple and his team - including programmer Lawrence Stromski, production LX Andy Murrell and Black Light’s lighting crew of Tom Pritchard, James Froment and Jon Meggat, together with Yuetong Heather An and Olivia Charneux - carefully positioned the Astera Tubes in the assorted rooms, a process that took two days.

These were a mix of classrooms, staff rooms, common rooms, canteens, storage areas, etc., and in general the Tubes were positioned for producing a soft glow of luminance that would radiate out through the windows. Sometimes they were rigged on bookshelves, desks, on chairs or tables set up in the middle of the room or on the floor.

Helios were also used in former gas lanterns on the exterior of the building to add a warm lantern-like glow. The total pixel count was 890. Some of the larger rooms would have two Hyperion Tubes set up to throw light out of six or eight windows, while some of the smaller spaces would be illuminated with a single Helios tube.

All the fixtures were powered locally via single power supplies plugged into 13-amp sockets, with data running via a Lumen Radio network. All the Astera products on the show were run in multi-pixel CRMX2-mode, using four Lumen Radio Aurora transmitters, one for each facade of the building.

The complete Astera setup comprised four DMX universes out of ten in total on the show, with the 400 timecoded lighting cues programmed on a GrandMA2 console and combined with video and sound production cues during playback which was from the QLab audio track controller.

Also instrumental to the success of “Where to Begin”, which played over three evenings attracting 3,000 people each night, were producer Holly Goodfellow, head of operations Dan Adams, technical production manager Al Pickard, and project coordinator Ellen Fernley.

(Photos: Jess Shurte/Phil Supple)

www.astera-led.com

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