I love Christmas time, I almost revert to just being a big kid when the festive season rocks around each year. In whatever fashion you...
I love Christmas time, I almost revert to just being a big kid when the festive season rocks around each year. In whatever fashion your family chooses to celebrate it, Christmas is that little oasis of time when it's OK not to keep up with the negative news on the TV and instead tune in to the veritable smorgasbord of life; parties, events, food, carols, being with family and watching re-runs of old favourites. Even the department store music seems bearable for that one month, piping out the Christmas cheer.
One of my personal favourite festive activities is going for the annual December "Christmas light hunt", some families really get creative building magical light shows for their community to enjoy. Where I live in Darwin, Australia the light shows have really improved in the last few years. They are gigantic moon leaps better than when I was growing up, partially due to the availability of good LED lighting and partially to the time and effort people will go to to put on these displays.
Two people who put in an exceptional amount of effort to their Christmas displays are Rob and Mel Russell. The Russell family introduced us to Darwin's first synchronised light display in 2014 when they turned their Thornton Crescent home in the suburb of Moil into a music filled "frozen" winter wonderland, no mean feat considering Australia's traditionally antipodean Christmas weather is NOT winter-ish in the slightest at this time of year. A lot of planning and set-up goes into the Thornton Crescent light show with Rob even suggesting that starting in September may have still left them a little rushed for comfort.
Rob & Mel on what it takes to do their show
... and what Christmas means to them
The unexpected success of their 2014 show resulted in thousands of locals visiting the sidewalks over the road from their house for their twice nightly displays, this year naturally the display is bigger and better with lessons learned prompting council endorsed road closures for the show and the college around the corner from them graciously allowing visitors to use their extensive car parking facilities just to attend each session.
The unexpected success of their 2014 show resulted in thousands of locals visiting the sidewalks over the road from their house for their twice nightly displays, this year naturally the display is bigger and better with lessons learned prompting council endorsed road closures for the show and the college around the corner from them graciously allowing visitors to use their extensive car parking facilities just to attend each session.
The Tech Specs for those that are interested:
- 1 x Light-O-Rama high speed network with 13 macro controllers, 2 dumb controllers and 2, 32 port pro controllers.
- 1 x Advatek DMX network with 5 universes.
- The tree is a 6 m tall mega tree, consisting of 12 x 5m cosmic colour ribbons.
- The matrix is a 2m x 1m screen with 10 x 2m smart RGB pixels strings.
- Software for sequencing Light-O-Rama. S4 pro suite.
- Approx 500m of electrical cable, 120m of smart pixels, 25m of dumb pixels, 5 strobe’s, 200m of generic LED’s
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