by Diggersworld.com Programming the Light Show: Twenty three light controllers control this years light show.  Each controller can control 16 sections of light.  A section of light, for example, may be one red string of lights on the tall 3D trees, one of the dancing trees, or one small segment on the leaping arches. A central ‘Director’ sends commands to each light controller at precise times - up to 20 times per second. The commands tell the controller to turn on or off, fade up or down, blink randomly, and shimmer (repeat a very fast on/off) at any time during a song. The difficult part is deciding when to send the command to the lights.  The software package that assists this is from Light-O-Rama.  Each song is listened to in small sections of a couple of seconds often at 1/2 speed and then a designer decides what the display should look like at that point in time. The image below is the LOR programming software showing a sequenced 7-second section of Wizards in Winter.  Only a small section of the total number of channels are displayed.  The image on the right is an animated picture that gives me an idea of what the display will look like as the song plays.   Dancing Tree Voices We had a group of 2 children and 4 teenagers perform the voices of the dancing trees.  The pitch of the voices are changed using a computer to sound more ‘elfish’.  There are a couple more enhancements done on the voices so the they stand out when broadcast over the radio.