We made St George’s Park the first test cricket ground in the world to operate an LED floodlight system, and the first to receive our Apollo controls.
Apollo Control System • Integration • Design
Hosting its first Test match in March 1889, St George’s Park is the home of the Port Elizabeth Cricket Club, one of the oldest cricket clubs in South Africa. The first ground in the world to host test cricket outside of England and Australia, St George’s Park is well known for its brass band performances and unique atmosphere.
Bringing new life to this historic venue, Stadium FX was contracted by Musco Sports Lighting South Africa to design, supply and program a comprehensive AV lighting control system. The system would provide the ability to have lighting effects either with or without the playing square lit, bringing a real element of fanfare to every single run scored and every wicket claimed.
To truly bring fans as close to the action as possible, Stadium FX designed a PC-based control system building upon the software of our Apollo Control system. A combined head-end PC controller and a custom Output node provided the perfect balance of control and fail-safe, allowing St George’s Park to be ambitious with their lighting without the fear of overcomplicating things.
As ever, we produced a full 3D CAD real-time programming environment using Cast Wysiwyg lighting software with imported data from Musco. The Apollo system controls the Musco Lighting “TLC for LED” floodlights, as well as providing audio output for synchronised light shows, and this versatility was something the management at SGP were extremely impressed with.
The forward-thinking nature of the lighting installation we delivered now allows Stadium FX programmers to arrive onsite at St George’s Park with virtually all of the programming ready to look at. Musco fixtures come pre-aimed from the factory in Iowa and, with Stadium FX working from this same focus data, the install time window is greatly reduced.
The grids of fixtures on the five lighting poles at St George’s Park provided our Technical Director, Sam MacLaren, with a fantastic programming canvas for geometric and text effects, which he gladly used to full effect. Stadium FX has since completed two more first-class cricket stadium installs in the UK, in Essex and Taunton, using an increasingly innovative range of crowd-pleasing, dynamic effects.
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