Caribiner International contracted Essential Lighting to manage the lighting design for the recent Allied Dunbar Sales Convention. The brief from Caribiner's producer, Andrew Price was, as always, to make the event better, bigger and faster than ever. The set designs and drawings were distributed electronically by the beginning of December. Working in Essential's new WYSIWYG suite, lighting designer Tony Hall then turned these into a full blown drawing, complete with the attendant lighting of 190 moving fixtures (170 Martin MAC fixtures, 14 moving mirror units, 3 CityColors, a 7Kw Xenon searchlight) and some 60 generic fittings. Five days of intensive lighting programming followed, using Whole Hog II lighting desks for the moving elements of the show, and a Pearl 2000 for the Generic aspects. Two Wholehog II desks were used for show control, linked together as a master desk and a tracking back-up desk. One of the outputs of the Hog was overdriven to obtain the required five strings of DMX for the moving lights. The Pearl 2000 was backed up by an ARRI Reflections unit with an overdrive box, to cater for the two strings of DMX being sent from this desk.
