Council & Public Events · Brisbane Region

Working With Brisbane City Council

When Brisbane City Council approached us to light up South Bank Parklands for their extended summer programming, the brief was clear: transform the iconic outdoor space into an all-hours event destination without compromising the landscape's natural appeal. South Bank's strength is its openness. The lagoon, the grass terraces, the pathways connecting everything—light it wrong and you've created a car park. Light it right, and you've extended a world-class venue by six hours a day. We pitched a three-layer approach. First, adaptive ambient lighting: warm LED ground-wash along the main pathways, keeping foot-traffic safe and legible without spill onto the water. Second, sculptural accents on the iconic tree clusters using intelligent RGB fixtures, colour-locked to match whatever event was running that night (blues for jazz, warm ambers for families, cooler whites for the festival nights). Third, dynamic coverage: we rigged moving lights on the central performance terraces so every configuration from acoustic sets to full 300-person crowds had proper stage light without blinding the audience with backlight. The challenge was infrastructure. South Bank's heritage status meant no permanent installations. Every rig had to come in, function flawlessly for 4–6 weeks, and come out clean. We built modular floor-mounted rigs using weighted bases and magnetic breakaway connectors, everything daisy-chained on DMX so a single console operator could reprogram the whole space in under 10 minutes between events. Predictably, Christmas in the City was peak demand. The council wanted the Parklands to feel celebratory but not tacky—a tight rope at that scale. We saturated the tree canopies with warm festoon uplighting, kept the pathways to warm 2700K LED strips, and reserved the intelligent fixtures for the main stage area where colour could matter. The result: families lingered three hours longer than previous years, and the council booked us for the following summer without tender. By November, we'd run seventeen different event configs through that rig. Zero equipment failures, zero safety incidents, and a partnership that turned into annual work. South Bank isn't just a gorgeous venue—it's proof that intelligent lighting design respects the space and amplifies what's already there instead of fighting it.