Since Graham Edmondson launched Edmondson Design & Production in 2024, the Boston-based firm has become a go-to for production design, technical direction, and lighting design for a wide range of highly complex projects. Among them was a major national corporate gathering in Orlando, Florida, for which the company deployed a Luminex network system to meet their client’s substantial lighting requirements.
“We needed to control 85,000+ parameters of lighting fixtures through our consoles and Resolume,” Edmondson explains. “We used four LumiCores to merge and manage almost 250,000 parameters between multiple input sources and output across 13 VLANs to handle all of this, which included over 800 fixtures controlled directly via IP.”
In all, the Luminex system included – one (LumenRadio) Stardust CRMX Transmitter and multiple (Luminex) GigaCore Ethernet switches (four GigCore 26i, three 16i 10G, two 10, two 18t 10G, one 10t, as well as four LumiCore 64, and nine LumiNode 12).
Leveraging his extensive experience in theatrical lighting and design, Edmondson has managed a wide range of live and broadcasted corporate, social, and educational events in a variety of settings over time. In this case, Edmondson Design & Production was brought on board for production design. “Our team handled all of the design and drawing in pre-production and managed all of the lighting, staging, and ground rigging elements,” he says.
Edmondson was also responsible for the signature scenic element, 260 custom-fabricated pixel-mappable tables with integrated LED elements. “There were significant amounts of LED pixel mapping – hence the channel counts,” Edmondson notes, explaining that the pixel-mapping portion of the infrastructure consisted of three main components.
The first consisted of 500 LED tube lights on the left and right walls of the space, hung in a grid configuration, then pixel-mapped and controlled from the lighting system and Resolume. The second component was a 200-foot-wide upstage cyc lit by 32 (Chroma-Q) Color Force II 72s with pixel-mappable strobe units as an upstage ground row for eye candy.
The third component was the previously mentioned tables: “We custom-built those with a frosted acrylic (top), so we could run color and have movement across the tables where people were seated. We spent a lot of time working on the control of the tables, both from an artistic standpoint as well as a practical one. We filled up two LumiCores with table control alone.”
“Coming from theatre, I love creating things that are dramatic and tell a story, and the tables certainly achieve that because the people (in the room) were interacting with light constantly. It was a fully immersive environment, with light moving across the tables, the stage, the floor, and the ceiling.”
“The Luminex ecosystem allowed us to manage all of our network infrastructure easily, using Araneo,” Edmondson adds, “and the LumiCore’s provided an easy solution to merging and routing all the lighting data. We used different Luminex switches to fit different applications and specific requirements with a combination of 1G and 10G trunks.”
Given the scope and complexity of the systems deployed, “Time was the largest constraint. We had two days of shop prep and one day to get the network running on-site. Preproduction with Araneo was key. As the production company, we were absolutely thrilled with the Luminex equipment. When we had challenges, Anthony Stofflet (Brand Manager A.C. Americas) quickly provided answers and options. I worked with him a fair amount, and he gave me some good direction.”
“The LumiCore’s were critical to the project,” Edmondson concludes. “Having four LumiCore was certainly a significant amount of processing power, and we utilized them to their fullest. Our Luminex inventory was the behind-the-scenes key to this production’s success. Using Araneo to manage all of the various switch and edge devices allowed us to monitor the health of the network quickly and efficiently. We also made good use of the different models of switches, allowing us to match each production requirement with the right technology.”
