Lone Star Lights is a family-friendly Christmas light experience hosted at Carolina Creek, the Christian camp located an hour north of Houston. ADJ was selected by Carolina Creek as the exclusive supplier of entertainment lighting for the event, with equipment supplied via Alabama-based Team Wilson Media. Hydro Series moving heads, HEX Series static washes and battery-powered Mirage Q6 uplighters light up various exhibitions and attractions throughout.
Established in 2002, Carolina Creek offers overnight summer youth camps as well as year-round retreat facilities for churches, youth organisations and civic organisations, as well as corporate team building events. Hosting thousands of young people in the summer and busy most of the rest of the year, the holiday season has historically been a quiet time for the camp, so Lone Star Lights was brought to life to utilise the site during downtime, raising funds for the organisation which awards hundreds of scholarships each year to campers from urban/inner city communities.
In its second season last year, Lone Star Lights took place on select nights each week from the last Friday in November to the end of December. The walkthrough experience featured over a million Christmas lights spread across 68,797m2 and arranged into a series of thematic zones. From classic Christmas scenes to Texas-inspired designs, the light displays sat alongside a series of interactive experiences. These included wrangler-led trail rides, a farm with over 40 animals, a 558m2 light maze, a “Candy Cane Lane”, a zipwire, a high ropes course and three performance stages featuring live music and dance presentations.
Lone Star Lights also featured a specially commissioned nine-piece nativity set which visitors could walk around to hear stories told from the perspective of the various different characters.
To illuminate the various communal areas and themed zones of Lone Star Lights, Carolina Creek invested in a significant quantity of ADJ’s HEX IP Series of LED wash fixtures. 7P HEX IP, 12P HEX IP and 18P HEX IP pars were all utilised to up-light trees and illuminate paths and communal areas. Thirty-two HEX Panel IP and 15 HEX BAR IP panel and linear fixtures were featured during programmed colour chase sequences.
The only entertainment lighting fixtures that are permanently installed at Carolina Creek are COB Cannon Washes, which are utilised as house lights in one of the camp’s worship centres, as well as a collection of HEX IP Series wash units, which are used to illuminate the Aerial Park high ropes course to allow late night use during the camp season.
Carolina Creek’s director of creative production and digital services, Wes Armstrong, said: “One of the things we really looked for when choosing the lighting fixtures for Lone Star Lights was versatility. It doesn’t make sense for us as an organisation – both financially and in terms of our value of good stewardship – to sit on equipment and not use it for 320 days of the year. So, everything had to be IP-rated and have a dual purpose, so that it could be used for Lone Star Lights but also redeployed across the park for camps and other special events at different times of the year. The extreme versatility offered by the ADJ fixtures we selected is phenomenal. Not only can we make use of them all year round, they allow us to reimagine what Lone Star Lights might look like from year to year as we’re not stuck in a box because we purchased fixtures for specific purposes, instead we purchased a lighting toolkit that has infinite possibilities.”
Team Wilson Media’s general manager and project manager on this occasion, Nick Campfield, said: “There were a lot of reasons for choosing ADJ as our exclusive lighting supplier for this project. The product is solid and the reliability is really good; considering the number of fixtures involved, it’s incredible that there have been almost no issues with any of them.”
In addition to the static wash lighting, Carolina Creek also invested in ADJ’s Hydro Series of IP65-rated automated luminaires, opting for a combination of Hydro Profile and Hydro Spot 2 fixtures. Armstrong explained: “The Hydro Series fixtures were real gamechangers for us because of A, their IP-rating, which makes them incredibly flexible and B, their versatility and power, which is phenomenal. We previously had a small moving light rig consisting of 12 ADJ Vizi BSW 300s, which we used in our indoor worship centre, however, the Hydro fixtures give us so many more options.”
Armstrong continued: “I often joke with Team Wilson Media that if a fixture makes it through Lone Star Lights, then it’s been ‘Texas tested’. These fixtures have been put through the wringer over the past year, with both cool and extremely hot temperatures. They’ve withstood very wet conditions, and they’ve spent months out in the forest, in the mud where all kinds of bugs and animals found them, and they’ve lived to tell the tale. Put simply, they have survived camp, which is testament to their build quality and durability.”
