A whole city of light

Since 2020, Mandylights has brought a skyline to life for the Vivid Sydney – one of the largest light festivals in the world. The 23 night, multi-million visitor event transforms the city each year, with the Mandylights team behind the iconic Our Connected City artwork which sees the Sydney Harbour Bridge and dozens of CBD buildings come to life in a synchronised display of light and music that is visible for kilometres.

Our annual engagement includes turnkey creative design, project management, equipment supply and production delivery. As the only company ever to light both sides of the Harbour Bridge, over 3,000 fixtures are installed to create dynamic LED outlines, uplights and searchlight accents across the famous landmark. Throughout the city, up to two hundred searchlights and hundreds of other pixels, washlights and effects take over skyscrapers, entire precincts and iconic buildings around the Circular Quay and Barangaroo foreshores. Everything is linked with our proprietary technology, monitored in real time and operated from our customised control room on site.

The Mandylights creative team build the city-wide light show, accompanying musical soundtrack and work with festival directors on creative direction and show evolution to ensure that each festival edition maintains a unique identity.

 
 
 
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Creative Design

Our in house creative and technical design teams work together to create stunning shows that use the entire cityscape as a canvas. Creative concepts are built in detail with our clients at Destination NSW and dozens of public and private stakeholders in a design process that takes almost a full year and utilise dozens of buildings.

Concepts are then fully realised in a 3D environment where we’ve modelled the entire city of Sydney – complete with animated waves and streetlights down every laneway – to simulate the full effect of Our Connected City before we’ve installed a single fixture. In this space, the entire show can be pre-programmed – typically thousands of cues synced meticulously with every beat of a musical soundtrack.

On site, our teams focus each and every light over a series of nights, and rehearsals are conducted under the cover of darkness. When unveiled, each year’s show raises the bar in terms of spectacle – with every fixture performing in perfect sync across 23 nights of shows.

 
 
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In-house Production Delivery

Mandylights proudly delivers the entirety of Vivid Sydney in house – from the initial creative design through to every lighting fixture placement on every building and every LED tube across the Harbour Bridge. Installed over two months, systems employ our own fixtures that are controlled by our proprietary mNode systems – powerful 4G and satellite based control networks that allow for real time control of every fixture in every location, complete with live monitoring.

Never satisfied with existing stock equipment offerings, Mandylights has also developed its own range of powerful searchlights – our ‘mBeams’ and invested hundreds of hours of research and development into our ‘mTubes’ – specialist products that line the Sydney Harbour Bridge each year. We’re proud of the fact that our fixtures are the brightest, most resilient and purpose-built for outdoor spectacles and that we get to light up our home city every year.

The technical and production knowledge of our teams provide a secure backing for our creative design – allowing Mandylights to offer world-class design that is then delivered by our in house team.

 
 
 
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