HAMER HALL’S NEW LIGHTING RIG

Last year, I was working in Melbourne’s Hamer Hall with a lighting designer who will remain nameless. Several hours into our day he said; “This is such a nice venue. You have the best console money can buy and your fly system is a dream. But I’m sorry; your lights suck.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I answered. And then we both laughed as we continued to take it in turns hitting the back of one of the old fixtures with a ratchet in the hope its colour flag would come unstuck.

Those fixtures certainly earned their retirement, having originally been purchased in time for the 2012 reopening of the venue after a two-year closure and redevelopment. Any piece of technology would struggle to keep up twelve years after its creation, let alone one that was flogged as hard as those lights that serviced close to 300 performances each year. Jake Kirby, Lighting Supervisor at Hamer Hall, says the internal wiring had begun to harden, corrode and melt. “The looms were failing. The colour flags were failing. The looms going to the igniters were all failing.”

And the reality is that, even if a bit of percussive maintenance was able to get you by that day, lighting technology has progressed a lot since they were purchased. As the in-house supervisor, Kirby was able to design within the means of the rig, but this didn’t work when touring companies came in with an existing show file. “Hirers were coming in with show files doing things like having a gobo in red and the output just wasn’t enough.”

The days of redesigning shows on the spot are over, as Hamer Hall now has a new rig made up of 32 Martin MAC Ultra Performances and 21 Martin MAC Ultra Washes. Martin describes the fixtures as having “raised the bar for highly bright and compact lights. They feature benchmark output across the zoom range, a next- generation framing system, higher definition optics and astoundingly low noise levels.” When asked what he enjoys most about the new lights Kirby answers, “Everything.”

“I’ve been using functions that I’ve never been able to use before. I can have two gobos, a glass gobo and a breakup gobo, on top of each other, with a saturated colour and I’m still running the lights at 40 percent. I can use an animation wheel now without killing the output.”

“The installation of the MAC Ultras is the most exciting thing that I’ve done in my tenure here at Arts Centre Melbourne,” commented Peter Darby, Lighting Manager for the venue. “The old lighting gear doesn’t owe anyone any apologies, but by 2024, they were tired and weren’t delivering the output or feature set required of a premium venue like Hamer Hall. So, one of my first projects at Arts Centre Melbourne was to get the ball rolling for the refresh.”

Darby adds that the refurbishment has been a massive team effort between himself, Josh White (Project Manager, Theatre Technical Development), Dan McKay (Technical Director, Production), Trent Barclay (Hamer Hall’s Lighting Supervisor at the start of the project) and current Lighting Supervisor Jake Kirby.

They universally decided that the Martin MAC Ultras were the best option, with Darby remarking that “they’re Martin’s best LED lights and Hamer Hall is the best concert hall in Australia, so it’s a perfect match!”

“The support from Show Technology has been outstanding,” he added. “They came to the table with a fantastic package for us. Martin has also been amazing with a great extended warranty.”

Prior to the new lights coming in, Kirby favoured using source four tungsten fixtures in front of house positions for face light, as the CTO flags in the old movers didn’t complement skin tones. Ultra Performances are much brighter than the source fours and the ability to dial in CTO is useful especially for broadcast shows when you need to match the colour temperature to cameras. Framing shutters mean the job of refocusing to transform the Hall into a proscenium arch has gone from a manual job involving plenty of steps around the building and potential harnessing up, to a quick couple of minutes on the console.

The Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, the Hall’s resident hirer, previously limited their use of moving lights as the loud fans were not appropriate for quiet, classical music concerts. Now they can enjoy a wider variety of looks without disrupting acoustics. “It’s a world apart,” Kirby says, “It can do everything the designers want and more.”

“They are extremely quiet for an LED unit of that size,” Darby said. “They deliver the boldness in terms of output and the feature set required in our space. The Hamer Hall stage floor is very pale; previously, we would have lost coloured light on it. The MAC Ultras deliver lovely saturated colours and punch through everything.”

Whilst features such as framing and animation have become standard in a quality lighting fixture, Darby says the light output of the MAC Ultra is phenomenal. Darby and his colleagues surveyed a few LED spotlights, reporting that the MAC Ultra was the strongest.

“They are certainly the brightest when you go to deep reds or anything in that spectrum,” he added. “They used to disappear on the floor and now our programmers are like, oh, gee, I’m running at 30%, and it’s amazing! Previously, everything had to be full to see it.”

While the MAC Ultra’s quality of light and brightness are its most noticeable features, the shutter system, decent gobos, 1:7 zoom range and animation wheel are equally attractive.

For the time being, it’s safe to say everyone is happy with the new rig. Lighting designer Peter Rubie frequently works in the Hall and has enjoyed the new rig’s functionality. “I previsualise a lot of my shows that I bring into Hamer Hall and previously something that looked good in the visualiser often didn’t hold strong enough in reality. I am now free to fully explore creative visions and varying levels of intensity as the saturated colours punch through with ease. The zoom range of both fixtures is phenomenal and the tight end of the zoom gives just the right look to the beam, without an obvious hotspot. As an LD that is a frequent visitor to concert halls across Australia, I can honestly say that the new standard lighting rig is unmatched anywhere else.”

Finally, the MA Lighting grandMA3 full-size console Hamer Hall received last year has a great rig to control. The Lighting Department consciously chose to run the console in MA3 mode from the get-go as they decided it was better to have all programmers learn MA3 from the start instead of learning MA2 and then transitioning to MA3.

Darby also recently oversaw the lighting fit-out for Arts Centre Melbourne’s new black box space called The Show Room. The venue is designed for small to medium companies and is fully kitted out with help from Show Technology. The rig includes ShowPRO Pluto 350s, ShowPRO R3 Washes and an MA Lighting grandMA3 onPC command wing for control.

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Main Image: The Songs of Elton & George: Anthony Callea, Tim Campbell and John Foreman with the Australian Pops Orchestra. Lighting Design & Photography: Peter Rubie.