Douglas Heriot

Groundswell Lighting

Recently, I was the lighting designer for Groundswell South Coast at Lighthouse Church, with special guest Stan Walker. It was a great night with over 750 people packed into the auditorium! Having got the job last year by simply turning up to help on the morning of the event, it was nice to have a bit of time to plan and prepare this year.

vertical LED strip lights on a stage in an empty room

The rig had 15 Ehrgeiz LED Fusion bars (each with 20 individually controllable RGB LEDs) and a range of par cans, fresnels and blinders on 24 dimmers.

For control, I chose to use GrandMA onPC with a 2Port node. (Much better than Light Jockey, which I used last time). The iOS remote was quite fun while focusing! For easier live operation, we also used a Jands Stage 24 in wide mode to get 48 executor faders, using the DMX input of GrandMA. That’s more faders than a GrandMA full-size!

computer screens, a laptop, and a 48 fader 2-scene preset console

I programmed a range of effects on cues in HTP mode and some speed masters to allow easy on-the-fly control. With 48 faders, there was no need to ever change pages! I also created a simple Quartz Composer composition on my MacBook Pro to control a GrandMA executor with audio input from the drums.

I’m quite impressed that we basically created our own console, sort of equivalent to a GrandMA full-size, for a tenth of the price!

(Well it is missing lots of things – like encoder wheels, executor buttons, touch screens, etc. But for our purpose at least, none of that was an issue – it was great! Still quite difficult to learn and teach others how to use though.)