The Light Show for the 125th Anniversary of the Rensselaer Student Union was an ambitious, large scale spectacle experience for the RPI campus community. With this project I was given a great deal of creative freedom and a budget of $5,000 - I had been noticed by the Director of the Union for my work on another campus celebration. I began work on the project over the summer of 2015.
By the start of the 2015 school year, I'd assembled my team of technical collaborators and had gotten in touch with Phillips Lighting, who helped me find rentals. We ran nightly tests and met with different groups on campus to arrange for whatever support we needed. Finally, I helped kick off the ad campaign and wrote out all the sequences for the show.
I reasoned that the best way to advertise our big show was to give proof of its quality with some smaller ones, so we ran five-minute shows nightly for two weeks leading up to the final show at the Gala. The video you see above is of the Gala Show from November 14th.
Over the course of working on this show, I met so many members of the community, from the man who runs the Jumbotron at our football games to the head of the Lighting Research Center. I learned about advertising, tackled traffic safety problems, tested projectors, and made speeches.
Here's hoping that this new tradition of ambitious shows and celebrations will only grow as the years go by - it was an incredible blessing to have been part of this one.
To see the nightly shows all in a row, the Gala show, or a closer look at the Gala show window montage, follow this link to my Google Drive folder: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/0B4DPj_YocYaCakZlUlBDMVBHZlk
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2025 UPDATE: In 2015, my final effort with this show was to get permanent lights installed at the Union so that shows could be programmed and enjoyed through the next decades of the Union's future. Unbeknownst to me, that effort had continued, and in 2025, a $70,000 donation of permanent lights was revealed for the first time to the campus community. I was told by the Director of the Union that my show and vision for the lights was instrumental in securing the donation for this project - it truly was a direct result of my work 10 years earlier.