Sydney Opera House Lighting Overhaul

Written by: Catriona Strom
Extracted from source: CX Magazine Issue 60
The World Heritage listed Sydney Opera House is one of the busiest tourist and cultural precincts in Australia, welcoming around 7.4 million visitors every year. With approximately 1,700 paid performances per year, restaurants, bars, retail outlets and guided tours, the building operates 24 hours a day, 363 days a year.

Within this unique building lives a wide range of venues and facilities including the Concert Hall which is the largest interior venue at SOH, the Opera Theatre which is a proscenium arch lyric theatre with an orchestra pit and a combination of hand and powered flying system, the Drama Theatre which is a medium sized proscenium arch theatre with a combination of hand and powered flying system and twin revolves, the Playhouse which is an intimate performance venue with a seating capacity of 398 and the Studio which is an intimate, flexible venue with a seating capacity range from 220 to 350.

Since taking on the role of Head of Lighting at Sydney Opera House in 2008, Toby Sewell has steadily been overhauling the lighting department of this famous venue.

Toby is a student of WAAPA where he went to study stage management and fell in love with lighting during his second year. After a stint as a freelance technician he moved to Sydney where he secured a job with the Australian Opera staying with them for over fifteen years.

“The Opera was a brilliant training ground as a technician due to the amount of shows the Opera Company did,” said Toby. “It was also an invaluable experience as a designer as the core role of the job was sitting next to lighting designers learning how to recreate their shows. I got to work with many great lighting designers, directors and set designers and to tour Australia as well as internationally.”

Adapting shows to go into another venue, whether it’s the Victorian Arts Centre, QPAC, The Festival Center or His Majesty’s Perth, taught Toby a lot about lighting positions and a variety of lighting fixtures which was all invaluable training for his current position.

Toby’s last couple of years at the Opera Company saw him designing several productions for the company before he left to return to WAAPA to teach for a year. Upon returning to Sydney Toby got a rock’n’roll and corporate fix working as a Production and Account Manager for Chameleon Touring Systems. This position again gave him priceless exposure to a variety of venues and fixtures, extreme deadlines and 24 hour days over a four year period!

With a growing young family, Toby decided it was time for a job with more normal hours and in 2008 he secured his current position of Head of Lighting at Sydney Opera House.

“Through my previous work with the Opera Company I thought that I had a fairly good understanding of the SOH and the staff, the reality was I was aware of less than half of the house’s overall output,” commented Toby. “I was very keen to introduce some new blood and we were able to employ three new Lighting Supervisors within my first six months to extend our existing knowledge base. I wanted to inject new ideas and faces into the department and to be able to pool ideas.”

The SOH employs eighteen permanent full time lighting staff, a dozen almost permanent casuals and a pool of around ten casuals on top.

Controlling the House
After a comprehensive evaluation of current control surfaces, an extensive upgrade of lighting control consoles has seen the Opera House purchase three ETC ION2000 consoles, two ETC EOS12000 consoles and two ETC EOS8000 consoles.

Every venue in the SOH has a control room console of either an ETC ION or EOS which have replaced the aging Strand 500 series consoles.

“It’s been a fairly easy switch over for our operators as the logic and syntax is very similar from the Strand to ETC,” remarked Toby. “When opting for the ETC consoles I consulted with our clients such as the Opera Company who are very comfortable with the ETC consoles. I found a lot of the theatre designers were much more comfortable with the ETC consoles and philosophies. Sydney Theatre Company and Bell Shakespeare had purchased ETC IONs and so it made sense for us to have ETC consoles as the control room consoles".

“The ETC consoles are much more intuitive in how they use moving lights than the Strand consoles. We’ve had really positive feedback from our operators on both platforms: the EOS and the ION. They seem to have integrated really well into the system, we’ve had them a few months now and everybody is very comfortable with them,” said Toby.


Image One: Kyle Brockmann in the Opera Theatre Control Room with ETC EOS
Image Two: ETC ION2000 in The Studio
Image Three: Peter Lockwood (L) & Mathew Tweddle (R) in the Previz Suite with ETC EOS console