God Save the QueenBy: Catherine McHugh

50 • October 2015 • Lighting&Sound America

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Ferries, sailboats, speedboats,and even jet skis jockey forpositions on New York City’s

waterways, making them almost asbusy as its crowded streets. But onthe evening of July 14, Cunard andQuantum Theatricals managed tostop traffic in the middle of New YorkHarbor while they put on an eight-minute light show fit for a queen.

Tasked by Cunard officials to create“something different” (fireworks beingso Independence Day) for its final stopon its 175th anniversary voyage, cre-ative director and principal designerKelly Easterling and creative team pro-ducer Jayson Raitt, both of QuantumTheatricals, pitched doing a live showin the harbor, and Forever Cunard, the175th Anniversary Light Show

Spectacular, was launched.“Cunard has such a rich history in

New York. One in five immigrants tothe United States came here on aCunard ocean liner—imagine the feel-ing these people must have had whenthey sailed into New York harbor,”Raitt says. “So we wanted to dosomething that would emulate thatexperience for today’s New Yorker and

The QM2 makes a starring appearance in

Cunard’s 175th anniversary celebration

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give them the feeling of a journey thatfelt a little bit bigger than they were.”

During the creative process, theteam considered using pyrotechnicsand even talked about integratinglighting of the Statue of Liberty.“Ultimately, we felt that using thebackdrop of the ship in the harbor wasreally the angle and perspective thatwe wanted for the spectators.”

So, moments before the QueenMary 2 embarked on her return jour-ney back across the Atlantic, themighty vessel paused in New YorkHarbor between the Statue of Libertyand Battery Park. At approximately9:30pm, as spectators looked on fromBattery Park, the show began. The 50Chauvet Professional Legend 230SRbeams installed along the ship’s prom-enade deck spectacularly illuminatedNew York harbor and the sky above.Four Clay Paky Mythos fixtures wereinstalled on the shoreline.

“The Chauvet fixtures performedbetter than I had expected, which is atestament to the Chauvet Professionalline,” Easterling says. “We had origi-nally specified the Supersharpy fixturefrom Clay Paky because the quality ofthe beam and the brightness wereimportant to us but, because therewere a number of concert tours hap-pening in Canada, we couldn’t getthem.”

Those onshore and aboard the shiplistened to a medley that evoked thespan of Cunard’s 175-year history andwatched as dynamic lighting effectspunctuated the orchestral score. Thedesigners’ biggest challenge wasensuring that the lighting and musicalsoundtrack on both the Queen Mary 2and in Battery Park (which were abouta half mile apart) triggered at preciselythe same moment.

To make this happen, Easterlingconfigured a GPS time clock with cus-tom written software. When enabled,the clock sent a trigger to the ETC Ioncontrol console located on QueenMary 2 and another one in BatteryPark at exactly the same time. Theteam also developed custom power

distribution systems and cabling tosafely power and operate the fixtures.

Their efforts resulted in a fantasticspectacle as the lighting effects on theQueen Mary 2 were perfectly synchro-nized with the soundtrack in BatteryPark. This was all the more impressiveconsidering the challenges the movingvessel presented as a venue.

After loading the equipment in dur-ing the ship’s stop in Halifax, NovaScotia (with production support fromSolotech and Christie Lites and pro-

duction manager Shawn Fortis), thecreative team worked closely with theship’s captain and crew; closing downthe deck, or any other area of the ship,was not an option. “It was in the mid-dle of an anniversary cruise and atransatlantic crossing—those passen-gers paid a lot of money to be there,”Easterling explains. “So we had to bemindful of fitting in with the crew.”

Earlybird Visual provided the pre-visualization software (MA 3D, by MALighting). “We had some issues pro-P

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gramming because the way the visual-izer rendered the fixtures; they didn’tnecessarily always respond in realitythe same way they did in the visualiz-er,” Easterling explains. “So therehearsals at sea were really impor-

tant. We made a few changes at sea inthe days before the show, but whenwe saw the show on shore that wasthe first time we had actually seen it.”

Easterling worked with lightingdesigner Richard Chamblin to program

the show. “It took a lot of time to focusthe beams and make sure they werehitting correctly,” Easterling explains.“Although it was in the visualizer, weneeded the real time on the ship to doit. Fortunately, the schedule allowed usto load in the lights while we were inHalifax.

“We then had a day at sea and thenwe were in Boston and then there wasa day at sea,” Easterling continues.“So there were three or four nightswhere we could let loose—as much asthe captain would allow. We couldn’tbe too close to port or too close toshore but, if we were in internationalwaters, we could do whatever wewanted. We had a couple of really nicenights of weather with some greathumidity in the air so we could reallysee the beams cutting through the sky.That was a great way to test thelights.”

WorldStage and 4WallEntertainment provided productionsupport in the US; Jackson Millerserved as the console operator on theQueen Mary 2 and Philip Vilar was the

52 • October 2015 • Lighting&Sound America

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shore-side console operator. The weather for the show was

nearly perfect: extremely high humiditysupported the light beams but the rainheld off. “We were looking at theWeather Channel every five minutesbecause it kept going back and forthbetween 90% chance of rain and 10%chance,” Raitt admits. It was like anemotional roller coaster!”

Raitt and Cunard’s UK team devel-oped specific marine plans to choosethe exact location of the Queen Mary2 in New York harbor for the idealviewing of the nighttime spectacular.Cunard held a reception at BatteryGardens, a restaurant, but plenty ofspectators gathered near the shorelineto take in the event. To ensure thesafe operation of the show, Raittworked closely with several agencies,including US and Canadian Customs,Federal Aviation Administration, theCity of New York, US Coast Guard,and the New York Harbormaster.

“Everybody had to be on board,”Raitt explains. “We had to determinewhere the ship could actually physi-cally go, so there was a lot of discus-sion about exactly where it should bepositioned and how it could staythere. We had to clear the show 15minutes beforehand with the tower atJFK Airport and with the FAA. Whenthey approved it, they shut down theairspace and we started the show.Then we had to call them when theshow was over and they reopened theairspace. So there were a lot of detailsto pull together.”

“Cunard’s leadership was great andthey were really fantastic to workwith,” Raitt concludes. “We were reallyable to push for the vision that theywere looking for, but also somethingthat was very new and somewhatrisky. We are storytellers; that’s whatwe do. This show we created told thestory of Cunard through lights andmusic as best as we could in an eight-minute show.”

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