Robe enjoys Night of Progress for Audi e‐tron South African launch

Cape Town‐based lighting designer Marius Coetzee collaborated closely with Bradley Hilton from Pixel Nation to create a subtle and highly visual canvas and intricate high‐impact projection mapped show devised for the South African launch of the Audi e‐tron electric series.

Marius chose Robe moving lights – ESPRITES, LEDWash 600s and MegaPointes – to assist him in the task, all hand‐picked for their versatility, small size and because Marius likes working with Robe lights!

The fixtures were supplied by rental specialist MGG to the “Night of Progress” event which was created by the Full Circle agency for Audi South Africa and staged at Cape Town’s Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa.

The projection mapping covered several of the hollowed‐out silos making up the museum’s main atrium space. Marius and Bradley did one complete set up – including lining up the 6 x 20K projectors and getting the 26 moving lights in position, after which all the kit apart from the projection towers had to be struck so the museum could open that day. With no flown rigging points, everything had to be floor based. The projector tower positions were carefully calculated and fitted as unobtrusively into the environment as possible. Fixture placement was also critical to get the desired effects.

Ten Robe LEDWash 600s were deployed on the floor and strategically positioned to give the substantial washes needed, and the 10 x MegaPointes were in two straight lines across either side of the presentation area. No haze was allowed due to the art works, so Marius needed lights bright enough to work without, and MegaPointes were a go‐to choice. Four ESPRITES were positioned on the floor and the other two on two of the towers each side of the room, with all six used for key lighting and gobo work to complement that of the MegaPointes. They were a major part of the show and “worked brilliantly and just as I envisioned,” commented Marius. Not every part of the building surfaces was covered by the projections, especially around the top of the space, so here Marius created a more graphical style of lighting with the MegaPointes filling in these gaps with appropriate texturing, shaping, and colouring, stylistically mimicking the projected content. “Working with a fixture like MegaPointes made this galvanising task quite achievable,” he noted.

Lighting was programmed onto a grandMA console which also MIDI triggered all the projection cues running via a disguise media server. The show area was fully obscured from the operating position, so the MIDI triggered cues helped make the process as fail‐safe as possible.

www.robe.cz

Photos © Sarah isaacs Photography