Sophisticated lighting system for 'Crown Live'

Built on the former site of the Mercury Lounge, Crown Live is a new direction for live music at the Crown entertainment complex in Melbourne. Learning from some of the design flaws in the previous venue, architect Kate Hart of Perrot Lyon Mathieson designed a very modern and completely redeveloped space to create a whole new venue.

The brief from the Crown management team - which included entertainment operations manager Garry Rappel - stated that they wanted Crown Live to be the most sophisticated live music venue in the country. Further to this, they wanted a superior lighting system that would act as the 'hero' for the venue. In order to achieve this, they approached Robert Joseph of Point Of View (POV) to design a dynamic and unique architectural lighting and AV system that would be adaptable to the variety of different music genres that the venue would play host to.

Lightmoves won the tender to supply key feature architectural lighting as well as the stage and entertainment lighting. A detailed colour scheme was implemented to create the dynamic feel, allowing the space and the ambience to change at the touch of a button. This included Digilin RGB marker lights to light a path from the front entry and to up-light a decorative column near the stairs and Ultrabright RGB LED strips to create a colour-changing feature under the numerous dry bars and to the front of the upstairs bar.

This formed part of a specific lighting solution; a detail that was vitally important to Joseph: "The idea was to give the venue its own voice and to support what music was going on. One dominant colour for jazz nights, a different colour for blues nights. The LEDs needed to serve a purpose; not just be used for the sake of it."

All architectural LEDs are DMX-controlled via an Enttec streamer which is interfaced into the Dynalite house lighting system. The Dynalite system in Crown Live expanded on the existing 8500 dimmer channels and 1100 control panels already in operation around the Crown complex.

Unlike the old mezzanine level of the Mercury Lounge, the new upstairs lounge is virtually a separate space; allowing patrons to still hear the live music, but be able to socialise like a traditional bar. While the downstairs bar remained relatively unchanged from the old venue, a projector was used to create images on the wall behind it, to provide support for the space when music wasn't being played. The detailed colour scheme is also built into the main wall next to the band, through the use of colour-changing panels behind glass. The space is finished off with Budlight to the bottom of the steel columns and four beam shapers project custom 'gobo' images onto the diffused glass wall outside the entry to the toilets.

Crown's in-house entertainment lighting designers Kait Hall and Cam McKaige of Let There Be Light worked on the design and implementation of the stage lighting. The highlight of the rig is 20 Martin MAC 700s, used for their ability to colour mix. The stage backdrop includes a series of horizontal colour-changing LED tubes and a circular projection screen to create a range of stunning effects. A projector is used to project moving images onto the screen from a media server.

Lightmoves, with installation partners EPM&C, supplied and installed the extensive lighting infrastructure to the venue, including 400 mm box truss and motors, circuit tube, patch panels and LSC dimmers, as well as a comprehensive audio/visual cabling infrastructure. The venue was also 'future-proofed' by running ethernet throughout the building.