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Robe supports Hungarian National Day spectacular

Hungary celebrated its National Day on August 20, 2025, with a 35-minute timecoded show in Budapest, involving monumental projection, lasers, lighting, drone shows and a massive firework display which blew up along a 5 km stretch of the Danube River.

Visual Europe Group (VEG) was the event’s main technical supplier, providing sound, lighting, lasers, video walls, projection mapping, and a large-scale drone show for this extensive main city centre site along both sides - Buda and Pest - of the river. Robe moving lights - iBolts, iFortes and iForte LTXs - played a significant role in illuminating four key architectural elements - the 118-metre-wide Hungarian Parliament Building, the Hungarian National Gallery, the Széchenyi Chain Bridge and Elisabeth Bridge.

The project was managed by VEG’s in-house team, with all key technical decisions handled internally. Project lead Zoltán Ösz oversaw end-to-end production and delivery in alignment with the creative design team at Gyár Post Production Company, sister company and part of the Visual Europe Group.

Tibor Kalla was the lighting designer. It was the first time he had worked in this capacity on the National Day event, although previously he had been part of the team as a systems engineer and network installation specialist. He collaborated closely with VEG to choose the best fixture placements around the city to create the desired overall lighting aesthetic.

Eight Robe iBolts were positioned on top of the Chain Bridge’s two arches. iBolts were used as beacons of light to draw attention to the bridge as a focal point of the show. During the timecoded show, the arches were illuminated with projection, and the iBolt’s sky beams were synced with the music and projections. At the Parliament building - on the Pest side of the river - ten iFortes were positioned to illuminate the North side of the building, supporting the projections that appeared on its front facade.

The Hungarian National Gallery sits on the Buda bank of the river and is part of the Buda Palace complex. One of the highest altitude points across the whole city, it is highly visible as part of the show vista, and this year its front facade and central dome were illuminated with sixteen iForte LTXs in a series of different colours plus gobo texturing to give it more depth and resonance. The iForte LTXs were sitting on scaffolding towers built and spaced out along the Savoy Terrace in front of the National Gallery.

The Elisabeth Bridge pylons were illuminated with a total of sixteen iForte LTXs, with another 64 iFortes shooting beams off the sides. This bridge, built at the narrowest part of the Danube spanning 290 metres, was the furthest southern point of the main show site, with the Margaret Bridge being the most northern point in the opposite direction along the river. The fixtures were placed on staging platforms spaced along the bridge’s pedestrian walkway sections.

The Robe products were part of around 900 lighting fixtures deployed around the city centre site by VEG for a show that attracted approximately 1.5 million visitors to the city for a day of celebration, which saw Budapest become a big carnival with a distinctive festival atmosphere. Among the major challenges for the VEG team of 250 was coordinating with all the other independent technical departments, so when they arrived on-site, both the power supply and data infrastructure were already in place across this vast urban landscape.

The projection mapping was achieved using 67 Panasonic PT-RQ35K 35,000-lumen projectors and Disguise VX4 media servers, set up in containers at the main control position on the Buda side of the river opposite the Parliament building. They were shooting around 400 metres across to the facade of the 1902 neogothic architectural masterpiece.

The lighting build started on August 13 and continued until the evening of August 18, with just one rehearsal on August 19. Lighting rigging on Elisabeth Bridge was left until last, as it was only accessible once all the city centre road traffic closures were in place, coordinated by the police department. The fireworks were designed and executed independently by Budapest-based pyro specialists Nuvu and were fired from multiple sites, including a series of barges moored along the river.

The complete overall event organisation was delivered by Lounge Event, an event management agency sharing the same ownership as Visual Europe Group.

(Photos: Louise Stickland)

www.robe.cz

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