Firelight Festival

In late June, as Melbourne hunkered down for a bitterly cold winter, the Harry the Hirer Productions (HtH) team rolled out its third Firelight Festival on one of the most exposed and unforgiving sites in the city: the Docklands Precinct.

Firelight is Melbourne’s epic winter festival with fire pits, mesmerising light shows, live music, and pop-up foodie fests all themed around fire, winter, and family fun. The community festival is organised by the City of Melbourne and aims to bring people out into the Docklands Precinct during the winter. Firelight includes three main entertainment stages along with a small DJ Stage, roving performers, flame and lighting installations, site-wide music (provided by Optical Audio Productions), and plenty of winter foods on offer.

For the third year, Marcus Pugh of HtH has been tasked with lighting the event. “The sheer size of Firelight makes it a daunting proposition. It can take 45 minutes just to walk from one end of the site to the other, so my push bike gets a good workout during bump-in every year,” commented Marcus when quizzed on the show. “Much of the design is based around atmospheric site lighting, which takes a fair bit of logistics given the size of the area we light. We create the site lighting with strategically placed lighting towers with IP65 lighting (Chauvet Storm Wash Beams and Outcast 2s) in colours that relate to the themes of warmth, fire, and the industrial history of the Docklands. Through much experimentation of lighting control, we use a combination of fibre-optic cabling and wireless DMX.”

HtH updates and changes the lighting each year, bolstered by its ever-growing stock of premium lighting and rigging equipment.

The ‘hero-piece’ lighting gear this year was HtH’s new GLP JDC2 IPs. “These new JDC2s kick some major arse; they’ve got all the features we’ve come to love from the original JDC1s, plus so much more.” Marcus enthused. “The new IP65 casing is a huge bonus for a gig like Firelight. The flexibility in controlling the JDC2 panels without burning up heaps of parameters makes these perfect for busking live music, especially when there are eight-plus acts each night. I’m a huge fan of the new Digi FX and the ability to run NDI video feeds directly into the units. Luckily, ShowTools managed to get these delivered to Melbourne just in time for this show.”

Firelight 2024 allowed Marcus to debut HtH’s new ‘Lumi Dawg’ eye candy range of fittings.

“The new ‘Lumi Dawg’ range worked well upstage of the bands and was an easy choice for creating a flexible floor package backdrop on each of the stages,” he said.

HtH also utilised their new stock of IP65 UV floods, with many of the installations for this year’s Firelight based around UV lighting, with UV-treated playground equipment in the shape of giant native Australian animals, UV face-painting and a UV-themed installation called ‘Morphology’ from the local art collective, the indirect Object. Marcus and the HtH team worked with the indirect Object and engineers to create massive truss arches to hold hundreds of coloured UV Tubes that made up Morphology.

Marcus commented, “I love lighting this show; it throws up many challenges each year, and I enjoy overcoming them with a mix of cutting-edge new tech and a few old-school solutions. For example, we use gels to colour the streetlights but we use a CNC machine to cut them into a complex shape that fits well over the streetlight fittings.

Firelight is well received each year, and I love seeing the community embrace the event despite the less-than-desirable weather!”

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Photo Credit: Martin Philbey