SGM Creates Spectacular Night Scapes at Fourth e-Luminate Cambridge Festival

	e-Luminate Cambridge Festival. Photo: Courtesy of David Johnson, Cambridge News.

SGM, a manufacturer of architectural and production LED lighting, again joined forces with creative technical event production company Hawthorn for the fourth time to sponsor the annual e-Luminate Cambridge Festival.

The week-long festival, which features a series of events, workshops, and artistic projections and installations, saw the festival return to the Great St Mary's Church following an absence -- and it was here that the event kicked off with a grand concert featuring the 100-piece Dowsing Sound Collective choir ... and an opening address from the Mayor.

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.

Calling on 14 of SGM's award-winning IP65-rated P-5's, fitted with 43-degree lens, to wash the outside of the imposing monument, the Hawthorn crew helped to transform this and 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, a further 12 of the smaller P-2s were used inside the church along with a pair of Q-7s, which alternate between flood, blinder, and strobe functions, providing a shimmering backlight from the rear.

On the Friday, the color scheme turned to pink as the church promoted the Pink Week initiative. This is a student-led breast cancer fund and awareness raising campaign, set up in 2011, that runs across UK university campuses.

Kirby stated, "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."

Clarke-Hill responded, "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; they 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 meant that we were able to transform this venue into a fantastic backdrop to the festival."

e-Luminate was originally co-founded by Alessandra Caggiano and Hugh Parnell in 2012, and the former admits, "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."

"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."