Enchanted with d&b
The Enchanted Forest is a walk in the woods married to the mores of modern presentation. Staged around the shores of a small Loch in Faskally Wood, not far from Perth in the lowlands of Scotland, the site is quiet, secluded, and quite magical in its own right. Intended to support the local economy, the Scottish Forestry Commission wanted to stage an event that would bring visitors to the locale outside the normal tourist season and through competitive tendering, finally engaged the services of James Mitchelmore. Mitchelmore is a project manager and designer for Tower Productions, a well-known lighting and production service provider based in Edinburgh.
Mitchelmore took the Loch's calm mirror like surface as the inspiration for his son et lumière concept. "The theme presented is 'Reflections', the overall ethos of the presentation is for the audience to be contemplative; so I conceived the idea to engage the services of a local composer and have them write three passages of music, five minutes each, that would be scored to the ideas I already had about lighting sequences."
Visitors watch the lighting and music presentation from an opposite shore, perhaps three hundred yards across the Loch, having circumnavigated the loch shore, lead by small but seductive vignettes of lighting and sound, placed and time sequenced by Mitchelmore to draw them round. "I engaged the services of the Warehouse Sound Services, calling on Cameron Crosby to design a sound system suited to this unusual environment." The Warehouse is a leading Scottish pro audio service and sales company with bases in both Edinburgh and Glasgow. "We were confidant that Cameron would deliver a design that worked perfectly for the location, and didn't disturb the one or two residents who live in and around the forest."
"I put in a very straight forward system of two Q-SUBs and two Q1 loudspeakers per side for the main show," said Crosby. "I chose the Q1s for throw, the fifteen degrees of the Q1 meant I wasn't exciting the whole forest but was easily covering the audience."
The three musical sequences passed from an atmospheric electronic section, moody and quite eerie, to a more classical composition with a strong pastoral theme, ending in a modern contemporary mode with the lighting effects enhanced with giant gas flares blasting out from the water's surface. The audiences were mesmerised, "I can't fault the result," said Mitchelmore, "it sounded wonderful."
