Nick Humphrey
Lighting Design / Programming
London, UK
WACKIT Contest Winner 2020
Awarded 1st place by VIP panel of lighting designers
The Contest
​
In November 2020, the CAST group of companies and Claypaky created a virtual lighting competition based on a concept by lighting designer Durham Marenghi and his partner, Jennie.
​
The competition comprised two categories; professional and students, created to give lighting designers and programmers around the UK and Ireland something to do during the second lockdown of the COVID19 pandemic.
​
Judging the contestants was a prestigious panel of four world class lighting designers:
​
-
Durham Marenghi - Classical Spectacular, Rio Summer Olympic Ceremonies 2016, Diamond Jubilee concert
-
Paule Constable - Warhorse (2011 Tony Award Winner, Best Lighting), Curious Incident (2015 Tony Award Winner, Best Lighting)
-
David Bishop - Live Earth, The Royal Variety Performance, Strictly Come Dancing, X Factor, Britains Got Talent
-
Davy Sherwin - Snow Patrol, Foals, Travis, Declan Mckenna, Wolf Alice, The Darkness
​
Very Generous prizes were offered in both student and professional categories:
​
-
1st Place - £1000 Amazon Voucher, 12 month WYSIWYG Perform license, a trip for two to the Claypaky factory in Bergamo, Claypaky and CAST merchandising.
-
2nd Place - £500 Amazon Voucher, 9 month WYSIWYG Perform license, a trip to the Claypaky factory in Bergamo, Claypaky and CAST merchandising.
-
3rd Place - 6 month WYSIWYG Perform license, Claypaky and CAST merchandising.
​
The brief was to design and program lighting for a musical track in WYSIWYG, using the provided 3D model of the Royal Albert Hall, whilst utilising the lighting rig of Classical Spectacular. No fixtures could be added but up to 3 lasers and light emission could be used.
​
​
​
​
​
My Entry
​
Like a majority of my peers, 2020 had been a bizarre, hard and unique year for me with many challenges to overcome. During my time on flexi-furlough from the hall I was determined to use my free time learning and improving my skills as much as possible.
I was just starting a new WYSIWYG project when my manager at the Hall informed me about the WACKIT Contest.
An hour later I had signed up to the competition and started creating my showfile using GrandMA2 on PC and a selection of touch screens.
​
The piece of music I selected was a re-mix of Also Sprach Zarathustra and O Fortuna, an orchestral track which contains atmospheric quiet sections that swells into a spectacular climax. This music appealed to me, as I thought it would be a good chance to try and showcase moody "pretty" lighting, but also demonstrate more impactful big looks as the track progressed.
After everything was patched and my layouts were created, my process was to go through the whole track and program in key lighting for the trumpets, choirs and drums whenever they were playing. I used seperate cue stacks for the musicians keylights as otherwise the cues would not fire properly once timecoded. I then went through the track again and created the band light and the main looks.
​
My main aim was to build the lighting as the music built, I therefore started off the track with very minimal, simple lighting on the musicians and added bigger looks as it progressed.
​
As I work at the Albert Hall and it is my favourite venue in the world, I wanted to highlight some of the features that I notice working there on other shows. The main one of these was the chandelier. There is a camera shot that is used regularly in the BBC Proms and Mountbatten Festival of music, where a jib is positioned in bay 10 in the gallery and gets a moving shot of the large brass chandelier and then sweeps into the auditorium for an aerial shot of the stage. I really wanted to emulate this, so I created a 3D model of the chandelier in WYSIWYG and then added a DMX controlled camera to recreate the jib shot. As I wasn't limited by physics and what is possible with real life camera movement, I let the camera move all the way down to the stage to merge into it's default central shot.
Mountbatten Festival of Music 2020
Lighting Designer: Richard Rhys Thomas
WACKIT Competition Chandelier Shot
Lighting Designer: Nick Humphrey
The other highlights that I wanted to feature were the organ, mushrooms and pillars as these really make the hall a unique venue.
For the organ, I simply mapped an image of the organ onto a 2D plane. As we weren't allowed to add any more lights to the project, I used light emission to light the organ, mushrooms and pillars.
​
Once all my programming was done, I went through the track again and timecoded and fine tuned the cues.
​
The Results
​
In March 2021 the results were announced, and I was shocked and honoured to receive first place amongst some very strong
competition. I would like to acknowledge the other competitors, there was some amazing entries and I gained lots of ideas for the future from watching them. Below are the final results:
​
​
Professional Category
​
1st Place - Nick Humphrey
2nd Place - Kris Goodman
3rd Place - David Howard
​
Student Category
​
1st Place - Kris Plummer
2nd Place - Guy Knox-Holmes
3rd Place - Joshua Harriette
​
Thanks
​
​
I would like to thank Durham Marenghi, Clay Paky and CAST for putting on such an amazing and well thought through competition.
I thoroughly enjoyed it, learnt a lot, and it really helped stave off the boredom of lockdown!
Here is the video of my final competition Entry:
