#BeTheLightCOS - Manitou Springs School District 14

Jul 3

On May 20, 2020, at 8:20 p.m. (20:20), Colorado Springs residents and businesses were asked to participate in a movement honoring seniors of the 2020 graduating class. This movement, called #BeTheLightCOS, asked for anyone in the community to turn on their lights, from porch lights to work lights, for one hour to honor those graduating since they could not participate in a formal graduation ceremony due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Social media platforms were flooded with tagged photos showing support for these seniors throughout Colorado Springs.

When Eddy Sound heard about this event, we knew we not only wanted to participate, but go above and beyond. Through our DBA, Rokbox Entertainment, we spend a lot of time with high school students, so we wanted to show our appreciation to them. Owner Matthew Stoneback contacted Manitou Springs High School principal, Markus Moeder-Chandler, to ask if Eddy Sound could do something extraordinary for the Manitou Springs seniors. Our vision was to light the Manitou Springs School District 14 SILC administration building located directly behind the high school. We’ve lit the SILC building before for the 2019 CHSAA Fall Leadership Conference as well as the MSHS 2010 Homecoming dance, but we wanted to one-up ourselves for this event. Previously, we only illuminated the inside of the glass canopy, but for this event, we wanted people to see it from Highway 24. To do this, we included the north and east sides of the building in our design.

With the help from our Blizzard Lighting and X-Laser inventory, we were able to make the building shine. Blizzard Hotbox EXA’s highlighted the inside of the glass atrium, with Blizzard Blockhead Big Eye’s pushing beams into the mix made visible due to a Ultratec FX Radiance Hazer pumping out haze. On the outside of the building, we took advantage of the wireless functionality of Blizzard Skyboxes, as well as the extraordinary power of Blizzard COBZilla RGB’s. Around the mustang statue, Blizzard Blockhead II’s pushed solid white beams through the fog produced by our Antari’s MX-8 arena fogger. Finally, the finishing touches were provided by 2 X-Laser Skywriter HPX M-5’s, which we used to laser project “MSHS 2020” onto the side of the building.

All looks were programmed with Chroma-Q’s Vista 3 software on a S1 console. Two universes of DMX were wirelessly transmitted to the various locations of fixtures with Blizzard’s LightCaster W-DMX transceivers and receivers. Thanks to X-Laser’s Mercury Control Software, the Skywriter HPX M-5s were programmed on Vista as well, making the set-up and execution of this project streamlined and easy to implement. Having every piece of hardware controlled on one piece of software is a lighting designer’s dream.