Canada - Hundreds of ADJ luminaires were utilised by local production company Digital Media Integrations to transform the Heritage Park historical village in Calgary, for its annual Ghouls Night Out Halloween event. A combination of moving heads and static wash fixtures was used to create a spooky atmosphere throughout the park, with moody colours, crisp Gobo projections, striking silhouettes and theatrical strobe flashes all contributing to the immersive experience.
Established in 1964, Heritage Park has grown into one of Calgary’s premier tourist attractions. It brings to life the history of Western Canada, covering the 1860s to the 1950s, through period buildings, exhibits, and costumes that give visitors the opportunity to experience life in bygone times. The park’s historical collection comprises 50,000 artifacts and it features 180 exhibits and service structures, half of which are relocated originals, while the rest are replicas or analogues. The site is also home to the Gasoline Alley Museum, one of the world’s largest public collections of antique vehicles and oil- and gas-related artifacts.
The annual Ghouls Night Out is a family-friendly Halloween experience that sees Heritage Park transformed for the spooky season. It features fun games, hands-on crafts, costumed characters, live entertainment, and lots of photo opportunities. In 2025 it ran across four evenings from Thursday 23 October through Sunday 26 October and is the only time in the park’s calendar when visitors are admitted after dark. This means that additional lighting is necessary, not only to add to the event’s atmosphere but also to make the village safe for public access in the evening.
For 2025, the park’s events team – headed up by special events director, Warren Cummins – wanted to raise the bar in terms of the AV production for Ghouls Night Out. Warren knew Dustin Milne, owner of Digital Media Integrations, through the local events industry community and was aware of his company’s work on Ghostbusters movie promotions as well as his own home Halloween displays. Dustin was approached in June of this year to put together a proposal to serve as the event’s exclusive production contractor, supplying all the audiovisual equipment for the event
To illuminate Heritage Park’s main town square, Dustin and his team utilised a combination of Focus Flex L19 and Focus Flex L7 LED wash-zoom luminaires. Featuring 19 and seven 40W RGBL colour-mixing LEDs, respectively, these potent fixtures feature motorised zoom which delivers everything from a tight beam to a wide wash. The fixtures were rigged to a series of truss goalposts that were set up on the second-floor balconies of the buildings surrounding the main thoroughfare.
“The Focus Flex L19 and L7 are both really nice fixtures,” comments Dustin. “They are very bright, even when zoomed right out to cover a wide area like we had them for Ghouls Night Out. They’re also very versatile; for this project, all we needed were broad washes in saturated colours and nice warm white clarity for illuminating the performers, but for other events we’ve used their full pixel-mapping capability to create some very impressive effects.”
Alongside the wash fixtures on the truss goal posts were Focus Spot 6Z and Focus Profile automated luminaires, utilised to overlay gobo patterns on the background washes.
The fixture utilised in the greatest quantity for this production was the 12P HEX IP. Dustin and his team utilised them to illuminate windows from within, creating striking silhouettes, as well as to illuminate featured props. Pairs of fixtures were also mounted to truss pillars and used to light the winding main pathway that leads into the village.
Completing the line-up of fixtures used for the event were Focus Spot 5Z moving heads, which were rigged to select truss pillars along the entrance walkway to add gobo projections, and Jolt 300 LED-powered strobe/wash units, which illuminated the village’s train station.
Control was provided via an NX2 console from ADJ’s sister company Obsidian Control Systems. Lighting programmer Joseph Wolf created a time-coded show which ran throughout the event, running a variety of looks across the different themed zones as well as automatically triggering lighting cues for the regular performances. This meant that a lighting operator wasn’t required to manually run the lighting for four hours each night.
