TOP News | Rent / Event service
A Large-Scale Operation for "sparks"
It was probably the most spectacular use of the new "sparks" laser technology so far: The 30-minutes New Year Show, initiated and directed by Jerry Appelt in front of the Palace of the Parliament in Bucharest.
It is not only portentous ground for a whole country, but also a tremendous technical challenge, when it comes to perform an open-air show:
Right in the heart of Bucharest, the Palace of Parliament rises on an overall surface of 65.000 m2 up to 85 meters in the sky and invisibly reaches another 92 meters into the ground. It is the fantasy of Ceauşescu’s omnipotence, turned into stone. In fact, this monument holds some impressive records: It is not only the world’s heaviest building, but also the largest and most expensive administrative building in the world. In the ranking list of the largest buildings, it is just beaten by the Pentagon.
No matter what you do around the neoclassical construction, it always looks comparatively small. Nevertheless, the German lighting designer Jerry Appelt, experienced in staging large buildings, such as for example for the opening of Berlin’s new main station, took the challenge, to make the palace the centerpiece of his New Year Show.
Basing on the experienced local crew of 360Revolution and Stage Expert, Appelt imported some know how in the areas of equipment, operating and design from Germany, as for example fireworks designer Hans Mücke or Lutz Kleine-Herzbruch, responsible for laser choreography and fog.
In addition to a whole armada of Space Cannons and moving lights, the laser effects projectors of LOBO’s new "sparks" product line have been chosen for the show. “sparks” is modular system basing on compact, air-cooled, high-performance laser modules, available in different colors and power classes. Thanks to the practical building-block principle and a sophisticated compact housing, monochrome and multi-color laser systems can be tailored to any given application quickly and easily. The main difference to established solutions is the fact, that sparks not only provide high output powers, but also concentrate this power into an extraordinarily thin beam even on longer distances, also thanks to LOBO's post-collimation system PCS. This high power density results in very high effective brightness values (ELB), which make sparks just ideal for open airs or building projections, such as required in Bucharest.
Approx. 100 meters above the stage, a sparks system projected the countdown into the new year onto the facade of the 275 m wide Palace of Parliament and created mirror effects during the subsequent show, while five additional projectors have been installed to create atmospheric beam effects right in front of the spectators.
With their extraordinarily low divergence thanks to post-collimation and output powers of 24 Watts per sparks system, the used sparks systems actually are the world's brightest, air-cooled multi-color laser systems! Thus, the laser effects could even be recognized very well in spite of the extremely bright background created by the fireworks and more than 60 Space Cannons.