How Mandylights Illuminated Sydney

	"One of the hardest things for the team was curating the incoming submissions to ensure that a range of color palettes were represented every night, so that each night of Vivid felt special," says Neville.

Since 2020, Mandylights has brought a skyline to life for Vivid Sydney, one of the world's largest light festivals. The 23-night, multi-million-visitor event transforms the city each year, with the Mandylights team behind the iconic Our Connected City artwork, which brings the Sydney Harbour Bridge and dozens of CBD buildings to life in a synchronized display of light and music visible for miles. (Mandylights is a design firm with offices in Australia and the UK.) The Mandylights creative team builds the citywide light show, accompanies the musical soundtrack, and works with festival directors on annual creative direction and show evolution, ensuring that each festival edition maintains a unique identity.

In 2026, Mandylights took this further in conjunction with Destination NSW by adding the "Your Connected City" program, which resulted in over 500 entries from 33 different countries to light up Sydney in people's own color scheme of choice. The system consisted of two technical components, both developed by Mandylight's internal technical team. In the months leading up to the festival, Mandylights created a custom capture system that allowed people to select buildings, colors, and gradients they wanted to light the city with via an online portal.

Throughout the submission process, Mandylights were able to not only approve submissions but also schedule all the entries so people could follow along with when their submission would appear during Vivid.

One of the most challenging aspects of the project was managing thousands of public submissions while ensuring the city remained visually cohesive throughout Vivid Sydney's 23 nights. Every participant selected their own colors, creating an enormous variety of combinations that needed to be carefully curated across the festival.

"One of the hardest things for the team was curating the incoming submissions to ensure that a range of color palettes were represented every night, so that each night of Vivid felt special," says Richard Neville, Mandylights head of creative and CEO.

To help manage the project's scale, Mandylights developed an in-house application that analysed each submission and identified the key colors selected by participants. This allowed the team to group similar entries, balance color palettes across the festival and ensure that each evening delivered a unique visual experience.

The system also helped extend each participant's chosen colors beyond just the elements they selected. If a particular location was not directly included in a submission, complementary colours would be applied across other participating assets, allowing the city to respond as a connected canvas rather than a collection of individual installations.

Behind the scenes, the technical design team created a workflow that transformed the curated submissions into the programming needed to run the show throughout the festival. What once would have required days of repetitive manual programming can now be generated automatically, allowing the team to focus on refining the creative outcome rather than building thousands of individual lighting cues by hand.

"When we ran the first full test, it took more than forty-five minutes to process the complete twenty-three-day program," says Alex Hughes, head of technical design.

For the team, that first test demonstrated the potential of combining creative curation with automation at a scale that would have been difficult to achieve through traditional workflows. While every sequence was still reviewed and refined by the programming team, the new approach enabled thousands of public contributions to be translated into a city-wide lighting experience that remained both technically manageable and creatively cohesive.

Delivering the show, however, was only part of the challenge. Once thousands of lighting cues had been generated and distributed across the city, the team still needed to ensure they could be monitored and managed reliably throughout the festival's twenty-three-night run.

At the center of that operation is the Mandylights control container. Housing an MA Lighting grandMA3 control system and serving as the operational hub for the wider lighting and control infrastructure, it provides the team with a central point from which to oversee lighting, media and infrastructure distributed across the Vivid event.

The control system is connected to a secondary equipment rack on the Sydney Harbour Bridge, which distributes data to key locations and houses the Green Hippo media server systems responsible for the large-scale media playback requirements that drive the 1.86 miles of pixels installed on the bridge.

For 2026, Mandylights expanded its monitoring capabilities significantly, increasing the number of live data points monitored across the activation to more than 50,000. The system continuously tracks equipment status, network health, and environmental conditions, providing operators with a detailed view of the infrastructure supporting the show each night.

The monitoring platform is complemented by a network of 20 cameras positioned throughout the city, providing operators with real-time visibility into key installations and landmarks. This year also marks the first deployment of Mandylights' latest generation 4K PTZ camera systems, allowing the team to inspect installations remotely and diagnose issues with greater speed and confidence.

"Having visibility across the entire network is critical when you're operating a show at this scale," Hughes says. "The more information we have available in real time, the faster we can respond when something needs attention."

Together, the monitoring and control systems provide a comprehensive operational view of the festival, the company says, helping the team maintain a consistent experience across dozens of sites while supporting one of the largest connected lighting installations ever deployed.