LIGHTING

Lighting was a key design element of Sanctuary from the beginning; the façade’s design, for instance, was influenced by the need to diffuse LED light within the machine-cut wooden details. Robb Pope headed the lighting team, drawing from years of experience building large-scale lighting installations.

As a teenager, Pope was fascinated by VJing (matching video imagery with music), so he got two college degrees -- (1) animation and video editing, and (2) show production and concert touring. His first tour was with the Black Eyed Peas; from there, he toured with Tool, No Doubt, Green Day, and others, and created installations for Cirque du Soleil.

Of Sanctuary’s lighting system, Pope says, “The motivation was to provide an energetic refuge from the never-ending, stroboscopic, often garish sea of LED light that is the nighttime landscape on the playa at Burning Man. Subtlety, fluidity, organic: these terms formed the basis.”

A Subtle, Fluid, Organic Lighting System

As soon as Sanctuary was complete enough to see light play on the façade, Pope went to work. LEDs were tucked in between the layers of façade; Pope used addressable LEDs, meaning that each individual LED’s color could be changed at will. The lighting and laser system also included colored spotlights.  As Sanctuary was lit up, it shed light far out onto the playa and into the sky.

While building the LED lighting system, Pope collaborated with Adam LaBay and Anthony Garcia, who coordinated the laser system and spotlights. “Over the course of Burning Man 2018, the light show continued to evolve, and new looks were written to match the music,” says Pope. “Working with Adam and Anthony in the front of Sanctuary became second nature. Each show was like a conversation, with one of us setting a new look and the others responding. The moving-head spot fixtures created geometry in the sky.”

Technical Details

The show control system refers to the system of networked computers used to control the complex setup of lights, lasers, and pyro systems installed on Sanctuary. The backbone of the system is 2x 1GB networks bridged in the server room to allow the various systems to communicate. Pixel data was confined to one network, while show control over the lighting lasers and pyro occupied the second.

A detachable front-of-house booth was wheeled into position 150 feet in front of the DJ booth, and connected wirelessly with a high-bandwidth directional radio link. This allowed the show crew to operate the control servers remotely from front of house, without risking the actual show control data over a wireless link. In this way, we were able to have a clear view of the show we were creating, playing the art car like we were a band and it was our instrument.

  • Moving lights, pyro, and control over Madrix and Pangolin was done using Martin MPC.

  • Directional WiFi antennas allowed us to position front of house up to a kilometer from Sanctuary while retaining reliable control over the show systems.

  • MPC console coordinated and triggered looks on all of the show subsystems so a single operator was able to trigger synchronized looks across all fixtures.

  • All the show control servers are sealed in an air conditioned closet at the rear of the car to ensure they keep running in the harshest conditions.

  • 60,000 individually controllable LEDs accurately mapped 3-dimensionally in Madrix and saturated an entire gigabit network.

  • We ended up needing a 24-core dual CPU HP workstation, 128GB RAM, and a Nvidia Quadro to run the map smoothly with the effects we wanted.

  • Pixel mapping done entirely using Madrix running on a custom 24-core HP workstation.

  • Dual gigabit networks employed on the Madrix Server to isolate pixel data from the control data.

  • Control over Madrix came from MPC lighting software run on a separate server, coordinating facade lighting with the moving spots, lasers, and pyro.