The Bioluminescence Project headed to Grenfell in regional NSW to create projections for the opening night of the Henry Lawson Festival 2025. We ran workshops on Wednesday 4 & Thursday 5 June withthe main event happening on a chilly Friday night 6 June.

Hello Grenfell! We got straight into it and headed out to explore the Grenfell Showgrounds environment. The winter wind provided opportunities to capture video of leaves and grasses moving in the wind with plenty of rusty barbed wire and weathered logs for textures. There was even an old tyre with some water in it that had amazing algae patterns that were captured using a macro lens.

After an hour of biodiversity exploration it was time to warp, mirror, saturate and contrast the videos as the Bioluminioids used LumaFusion on the iPads to flex their creative muscle and create ingredients for the show. This is rapid content creation at its best! No time to think, just get in the creative flow and churn out amazing work!

The end of the day involved getting the big projectors out with @eye_candy_portals to test them on the Grenfell Showgrounds Pavilion and see what was possible. There are tools to work out projector placement, throw distances, images sizes and brightness which is always done at each site but there is nothing more fun that seeing the calculations work and doing some fine tuning on location!

Day two always starts with a bit of reflection at how far we have come in such a short time. In one day the Bioluminoids had shot video from the surrounding environment, learned a new video editing app and had generated the majority of content for the performance on Friday. You know that they had picked it up when they walk in the door for day two grab their iPad and start making more clips!

But there is more to do! After a bit of talking at them about the hardware and software we were going to use it was straight into hands-on video projection mapping practice. Mapping the inside of the pavilion before we headed out into the cold to do the outside. There was time for setting up and playing on the other visual content toys including the custom glitch photo app on one of @eye_candy_portals phones with a special macro lens attachment. Various items were collected to build a micro snapshot of the local environment in a petrie dish and for the document camera.

In record freezing temperatures we set up the projectors and got busy mapping the enormous Grenfell Showground Pavilion. The Bioluminoids flexed their creative muscles to come up with a cool triangle motif across the side and then iterated across the rest of the building. A quick test with the famous Beyard and we are ready and excited for the performance!!!

It doesn't matter how many Bioluminescence projects we do each and everyone is unique and special and the wonder when it all comes together never gets old! The wonder at the creativity of young people, their creative problem solving skills and their natural ability to put on a hell of a show! There is always a calm before the storm - all the gear is set up and we wait for the sun to go down and hope that the projectors are in the right spot (pretty close), that the software won't crash (it did) and that it will look as good as we think it does (it looked even better!).

And suddenly it's dark and the projections pop. The W.H. Simpson Pavilion comes alive with the Bioluminoids' videos, the live cameras and @eye_candy_portals glitch camera and macro lens. A three hour performance is massive but the crew are up to the task. Triggering their clips using a MIDI controller and Resolume Avenue, creating live compositions using found objects from the local environment and processing through the @entropyandsons Recursion Studio and building a macro world and capturing it with a video microscope are all elements to create a constantly shifting and evolving light mural across the building. Other young people come in to see what is happening and get lost in putting their hands in the camera, swapping out things on the turntables and even being shown by the Bioluminoids how to trigger clips and use the Recursion Studio. We even set a projector up in the van to project the logo.

This amazing night couldn't have happened without the support of the Henry Lawson Festival committee who helped with a thousand things! Thank you for bringing us to Grenfell to work with your young people to light up their place.

Bioluminescence is supported by @regionalartsnsw, @regionalartsaustralia and is in partnership with the Henry Lawson Festival Committee and @artsoutwest
The Regional Arts Fund is an Australian Government initiative that supports sustainable cultural development in regional, remote and very remote Australia.
The project was made possible by the Australian Government’s Regional Arts Fund, provided through Regional Arts Australia and Regional Arts NSW.

Bioluminescence @ The Henry Lawson Festival - Grenfell 2025