EVENT FOCUS
SKY SONG 3D drone art curators, Celestial team up with Adelaide’s largest event production company, Novatech Creative Event Technology, and veteran producers, Gluttony to ‘bring the stars to life’ and share ancient Aboriginal stories using cutting-edge technology at Adelaide Fringe Festival.
Words: Jacob Waite Photos: Celestial
Offering bespoke 360° creative design and production, Frome-based Celestial is slowly garnering a reputation in the live events sector for its spectacular drone show capabilities. Ever since the team’s first show at Edinburgh’s Hogmany in 2021, the specialist team of drone art curators has helped deliver creative solutions for the likes of Greenpeace, Amnesty, and Eden Project – as well as a residency of shows in Melbourne. Celestial’s latest collaboration, Sky Song, which takes place at Adelaide Fringe Festival, sees a unique combination of integrated, cutting-edge technology, creatives and technicians join forces to share the stories from Indigenous artists on topics such as connection to country, ancestry, the passing on of knowledge, land rights, the devastation of the stolen generations and reconciliation. Narrated by singer, songwriter and campaigner, Archie Roach, Sky Song unfolds over five chapters. Steered by the Adelaide Fringe and veteran producers, Gluttony, Sky Song quickly attracted some of the greatest First Nation talent working today. “We were approached by Heather Croall, the Director of the Adelaide Fringe Festival, to co-
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design a show in collaboration with a number of Aboriginal artists, poets, storytellers and musicians to create an emotionally powerful event,” said John Hopkins, one of founders at Celestial, retracing the roots of the project. Famed for his work in live touring circles, John ‘JP’ Partridge was brought in by Celestial to handle production design for the unique project. “Very rarely do you get an opportunity to do a project like this,” he said. “Plenty of concert tours get pushed across my desk but to embark on a project with such cutting-edge technology, which shares a unique message with a hard working crew involved was special.” In fact, it was a chance meeting with Celestial which landed JP the gig. “Celestial were setting up their business next door to where I work,” he reported. “When I first heard about this project, I was super excited. It breaks new ground, using drones as the ‘actors’ in an immersive performance.” Launched on 11 March at Leconfield and Richard Hamilton Wines in McLaren Vale, just outside of Adelaide, the 26 minute-long show featured over 1,000 s q m of projection onto one of the largest holographic fabric screens
ever to be used in the southern hemisphere. “Typically, our drones fly for around eight minutes consecutively, so we have three different swarms of 360 drones that launch at staggered intervals to extend the overall flight time. Underneath the drones were huge holographic screens, designed by JP, which projected virtual drones shows, married up with an integrated soundtrack and lighting,” Hopkins explained, referencing the 75m wide by 15m high Showtex Cielorama projection gauze. To fill the safety zone between the audience and the screen, and provide lighting from the ground and sky, JP designed a grid of 800 LEDs which were embedded in the ground to create a large lighting canvas. “It provides this ability to send lighting from the ground to the screens and to the sky, which is an exciting prospect – lights are typically situated on a truss, whereas with this project, you have the prospect of firing light metres into the sky,” JP explained. The designer harnessed Syncronorm Depence² to previsualise the entire show with two weeks of pre-programming in 3D. “The screens are so large and vast it is not feasible to build them for rehearsals, so they were built
