Every year for the past 18 years, the Kuyavian-Pomeranian Voivodeship (province) in Poland has hosted the country’s largest dance festival. For those 18 years, Białe Błota has come alive as 2,500 contestants and spectators from all over the country descend on a village whose usual population numbers just over 100.
For the last few years, the event has benefited from the technical skills and hard work of Mateusz Mielcarek and his team at Mielcarek Event, transforming a large, anonymous space into a sophisticated arena in which the contestants’ talents gain an outstanding showcase. Key to this are the innovative lighting effects designed and delivered by Mielcarek – using CAST Software’s wysiwyg lighting design and pre-visualisation software.
“Every year, we have done something different, starting from scratch to ensure each event is unique – and every year, we try to raise the bar,” said Mielcarek. “That means that we need incredibly smart tools that allow us express our energy and passion for what we do – and wysiwyg is perfect. It’s an essential element in our preparation.”
Some idea of the ambition of the event can be seen in the equipment list, with around 150 individual fixtures from the likes of Claypaky, DTS and Robe driven by a Jands Vista console. Mielcarek and his team spent 5 days in preparation, 7 days assembling the equipment and 3 days installing it at the venue.
“The ability that wysiwyg give us to create an entire project from scratch gives us many options for ensuring a professional implementation,” continued Mielcarek. “For example, the program includes a 3D viewer. That’s very important to us because it allows us to prepare the entire project to scale, replicating all the key elements. We use the wysiwyg Perform version as it is an all-in-one software, which combines 3D CAD, documentation, rendering, and pre-visualisation functions into one tool that’s very useful for large-scale production. Another interesting feature is the ability to simulate effects when connected to a DMX console or a compatible offline editor.”
According to Mielcarek, another key benefit of CAST Software’s wysiwyg is the ability it gives him to share with organisers what he has in mind in order to get feedback, and for the organisers to demonstrate to potential sponsors what the show will look like. “Not only does wysiwyg enable us to achieve a much more efficient production process,” said Mielcarek, “but it also helps the organisers to get financial support in a country where that can be very difficult.”
“We’re already thinking about next year’s show,” he concluded. “You can be sure that we’ll be using wysiwyg again – as well as all the other events we will support.”
You can see what Mielcarek and his team were able to achieve with wysiwyg on TPi TV.