Council & Public Events · Brisbane Region

Working With Brisbane City Council

Brisbane Festival runs for three weeks every September. It's the council's signature cultural event—multiple venues, concurrent programming, art installations, outdoor cinema, street performances. The scale is massive and the coordination is tighter than most touring productions. When the festival director called us in 2024 to handle 2025's lighting design, they were clear: this event makes or breaks the city's cultural calendar. The lighting has to reflect that. The festival that year had four distinct zones: South Bank Parklands (cinematic and intimate), City Botanic Gardens (architectural and subtle), Eagle Street Reach (contemporary and dynamic), and a pop-up outdoor cinema in North Quay (full-scale entertainment). That's not one lighting job. That's four simultaneous briefs with a single operational team and one DMX network sprawling across 2 kilometres of the city. We started by walking every location with the festival's creative director. We weren't brought in to build spectacle—we were brought in to amplify existing beauty and make sure every activation site felt like a coordinated experience, not a patchwork. That meant invisible infrastructure everywhere. The South Bank setup was our foundation. We distributed LED wash lights through the tree canopy at low intensity, giving the parklands a warm 2700K ambient without the visual clutter of visible rigs. Every bar and food stall had subtle backlighting so they read as destinations, not obstacles. The architectural moments—the bridges, the water features—got dedicated intelligent fixtures tuned to specific colour temperatures that shifted subtly as the sun set. The Botanic Gardens is heritage, so every rig had to be temporary and sympathetic. We used small intelligent spotlights mounted on discrete floor rigs, colour-locked to the foliage so the gardens felt illuminated, not staged. The cinema installations got full theatrical treatment: a 30-metre LED array for the big screen, 16x uplights for the audience seating, distributed accent lighting throughout the garden so people navigating to their seats never felt lost. Eagle Street Reach was the wild card—it's a restaurant and bar strip with heritage buildings and sightlines to the river. The festival wanted it to feel like a proper entertainment precinct, but the businesses were nervous about disruption. We rigged the street with warm LED strips low to the ground (invisible during the day, atmospheric at night) and intelligent fixtures on temporary trusses spanning the street, all tuned to warm ambers. Result: the precinct felt elevated without feeling like a festival site had colonised it. The North Quay cinema was pure logistics. We needed 60 metres of pathway lighting, a 500-seat audience area, proper stage lighting for the opening acts, and a 30-metre projection surface. We built the whole rig in modular sections—each section could be assembled, tested, and struck independently so if one area needed troubleshooting, the rest of the festival didn't slow down. Operationally, the real challenge was the human side. We had one main control position (at South Bank) and remote operators at each secondary site. We built a wireless DMX backup system so if the primary fibre connection dropped (and in a sprawling outdoor event, it will), every operator could still see the show and adapt. We trained the council's technical staff on every rig, so by week two of the festival, they didn't need us for reprogramming—they just called when something needed a tweak. The festival ran for twenty-one days. We struck gear on day 22 and left zero footprint. By October, the council had already extended the contract for 2026. They weren't paying for spectacle—they were paying for invisible professionalism that made their event feel coherent across four different locations. That's the work that matters.