The Rugby World Cup Opening Ceremony 2011
Rugby World Cup, Opening Celebration, Auckland
The Rugby World Cup of 2011 was the biggest sporting event ever to be staged in New Zealand. It started on 9th September 2011 with an opening ceremony in Auckland’s Eden Park, with an estimated 200,000 people crowded into the waterfront and a global television audience estimated at 50 million. David Eversfield of OpticShock was the Lighting Designer for the cityscape show, ‘All Lit Up’, which included 25 different lighting sites ranging from rooftops to port cranes.
Opticshock involved ALI to help create a sophisticated city-wide control network. Opticshock developed a fault tolerant radio ethernet network to distribute Art-Net from the GrandMA controller to the lights. ALI supplied the Art-Net to DMX nodes along with a custom backup system.
In a show of this magnitude, failure is just not acceptable. The backup system involved local playback devices which could run a local copy of the show onto its sub-network in the event that the main data link was lost or became unstable.
