SGM Creates Riveting Nightscapes at e-Luminate Festival

Each year, the historical city of Cambridge lights up during the annual e-Luminate Festival. The week-long affair features a series of events, workshops, and artistic projections and installations. Following an absence, the festival returned in full force in 2016 where SGM, one of the leading manufacturers of architectural and production LED lighting, joined forces with creative technical event production company Hawthorn for the fourth time to sponsor the annual Cambridge Festival.

"We're thrilled to be back at the e-luminate Cambridge Festival once again this year and to be able to showcase some different effects from our extensive portfolio in this historical city in conjunction with Hawthorn. This event is truly inspiring, bringing together art, culture, technology, and environmental awareness," said SGM UK's Ian Kirby.

In 2012, Alessandra Caggiano and Hugh Parnell co-founded e-Luminate, and each year they look forward to the light festival with great anticipation.

"This is now an eagerly-awaited event in the calendar, and much of this is to do with the cityscapes themselves as we light up Cambridge in a dazzling array of color and light," said Caggiano.

The 2016 edition of e-Luminate kicked off at the Great Mary's Church with an opening address from the Mayor and a grand concert featuring the 100-piece Dowsing Sound Collective choir. With assistance from SGM's Ian Kirby, who essentially designed the lighting at the church, Hawthorn Cambridge orchestrated the lighting display that accompanied the concert, with project manager Richard Clarke-Hill undertaking programming duties.

"It was a pleasure to work with SGM at e-luminate again this year. Hawthorn uses their P-5s frequently, so it was great to try out their P-2s and Q7, which were easy to rig and enabled us to produce a fantastic installation at Great St. Mary's Church. Delivering a project at such a high-profile event as e-Luminate is always an honor, and working together with Ian Kirby and SGM enabled us to transform this venue into a fantastic backdrop to the festival," said Hawthorn's Richard Clarke-Hill.

Together, they also planned for a change in the color scheme for a very special cause. For a whole day, the church was bathed in pink light promoting the Pink Week initiative, a student-led breast cancer fund and awareness campaign, that runs across UK University campuses.

Calling on 14 of SGM's award-winning IP65-rated P-5's, fitted with a 43° lens, to wash the outside of the imposing monument, the Hawthorn crew helped transform the church as well as the city's other iconic buildings into a shimmering nightscape using low energy lighting technologies.

While the P-5s were used as conventional wash lights, an additional 12 of the smaller P-2s were used inside the church along with a pair of Q-7s, which alternated between flood, binder, and strobe functions, providing a shimmering backlight from the rear.

"The feedback we received to the SGM lighting from the opening concert, where around 800 people assembled in Great St. Mary's, couldn't have been more positive and many people have used social media to register how engaged they felt with the lighting," said Alessandra Caggiano, co-founder of e-Luminate.