Bioluminescence @ Cobargo Folk Festival 2024

We were excited to be invited back to Cobargo Folk Festival for 2024. This time we were back but bigger with more! We started off a week before the festival learning all about DMX and setting up LED lights and programming them using a USB to DMX unit and LightKey software. We learned about addressing lights, using DMX splitters and daisy chaining. We set up our own scenes and sequences while lighting up the Supper Room at the Cobargo School of Arts getting ready for the festival weekend where we would create the Bioluminescence Light Portal.

Day one of the festival saw us exploring Narira Creek at the edge of the festival site capturing frogs, old skulls, water ripples and grass blowing in the wind with our cameras. Once back in the workshop shed we explored video editing using LumaFusion on the iPads. This was developing the content for the Saturday night performance.

Day 2 saw us transfer all of the clips – we had collectively made over 80 of them! Discussions were had on file formats, CODEC’s and file management. This got us ready for going through the video projection process. Shutting the roller door in the shed to darken it as much as possible we pointed a couple of projectors in there and used Heavy M to trace parts of the shed and start to learn how content is managed.

At the end of Day 2 we headed down to the main arena to set up the lighting installation and projection map the main music tent a 30m X 20m behemoth! We tested all the equipment and established two operational stations on each side of the portal which would end up being the main entrance on to the arena. We used the inbuilt grid test pattern to line up the two projectors and define the overlap to be able to edge blend them in HeavyM. One that was done we made out decisions on how to map the structure.

Then Day 3 was performance night! We lit the place up with our content on the roof of the main tent, with the magic of the wrist mounted projector Beyard and the twin lighting towers making the Bioluminescence Portal!

Bioluminescence @ Cobargo Folk Festival 2024 was proudly supported by the Yuin Folk Club, the Cobargo Community Access Centre, the Triangle Tool Library and the community of Cobargo.