SugarCity, located in Halfweg a small industrial town half way between Amsterdam and Haarlem in North Holland, is the newly sort-after venue for corporate events such as product launches, TV shows and photoshoots. It also hosts a network setup with the Visual Productions’ QuadCores, B-Stations and DIN rail DMX Splitters for control of the venues ambient lighting.
SugarCity uses the 1919 built Central Sugar Company factory. This industrial interior lends itself perfectly to the multi-venue usage, yet when unlit this steal interior was not easy to envisage as a rental location to top corporate clients. Bazelmans AVR was asked to design and install a permanent ambient lighting design for the venue. This should be capable of local easy control for the venue managers to select when showing prospect customers around. The venue also required that any additional lighting gear bought in by Bazelmans AVR and other technical companies, for the events should be able to connect to the same network with control either by an outsourced desk or integration with the permanent install solution.
Denise Schimmel, Director of SugarCity Events has chosen Bazelmans AVR for their years of experience in the lighting industry. Bazelmans AVR understood the wishes of SugarCity Events and saw the importance of a lightning design to express the industrial features of the old Sugar Factory. Dennie Tenniglo, Account Manager at Bazelmans AVR, brought Roel van Gisbergen in on the project to design and install the venues ambient lighting.
The 3 x QuadCores that Roel selected are set up in a network with a softpatch to the ELC nodes and 3 x B-Stations for end-user control. The venue’s lighting is divided into 3 areas, or zones, which can be easily handled in the QuadCore interface. 570 Quadcolors – from Dutch manufacturer CLF – are used to provide stylish up and downlighting throughout the venue. The DMX signal for these fixtures is boosted and divided around the venue by 12 of the Visual Productions DIN Rail DMX Splitters.
Roel programmed the lighting states with CueluxPro, ‘uploading’ them into the QuadCore.
The B-Stations have been programmed to allow for two separate scenarios; firstly, being the actions that are initially programmed to enable the B-Station to provide On/Off, and a large selection of preset colour states, and secondly, when over-ridden by an external desk the B-Stations can also be used to control the up and down intensity of all the venue lighting.
Roel set up the entire system so that the fixtures can also be controlled either with a simple 20-channel desk or with a larger desk, which then can take control of all of the +1500 individual channels.
TV shows such as the Voice of Holland are being recorded in the venue. The typical desk of choice for Bazelmans AVR is GrandMA2, which can just be plugged straight into the QuadCore network in order to take control of the ambient lighting during a live show. Tenniglo says of the B-Station that he was really pleased with how very user friendly and robust this device is: perfect for such a venue. Roel was personally pleased with the versatility of the QuadCore and complimentary of the eventual ease of programming the QuadCore and B-Station to provide the venue with this perfect flexible solution.
