2025 check in: how is your show going, what are you planning for 2026?

[Croydon Lights]

2025 bought a few problems this year with the tune to screen of p5 panels blowing fuses after a couple of hours running and not being able to find the cause I set up an old TV screen in the window and ran it off the PI from the p5 panel so I will have to look into the problem during the year
Went out to christmas dinner expeting to coming home with the display working but for what ever reason it decided not to on Xmas day and as I was late coming home decided not to run iton Xmas night as it was after 11 and I need to keep the neighbours happy so I will run it for the rest of December
Had some one try to steal my speakers out of the front gandern but they could not get them out of the bushes in the dark
Changed the display this year and removed the Mega tree as I was having problems with putting it up and replaced it with EFL Showstopper Phat Boy and a couple of EFL Showstopper Mini Trees also added some seed pixels Vertical around the Garage and front door way
Added a showstopper spinner to the roof of the garage that kept on blowing over so just laid it on the roof instead of having it vertical
Also added a push button for Santa to appear in the top story window that the kids really enjoyed and had quite a few people waving back to him when he appeared
Crowds were a bit smaller this year as there were no posting of the show this year on social media which I was happy with being a court and having traffic problems in the past
Overall I think it was a great year and enjoyed the happy faces and look forward to 2026

 

[Jase]

Had a pretty good year. We did a totally new show again. after a year off in 2024. Changed most of my vital props over to the YPS DUOs after a horrid year of failures in 2023 with my ETOP stock. Had absolutely no pixel issues at all this year. Not a single failure. Did have a weird problem when testing the show with the output of my Baldrick 8 flickering. Turned out it was because I had artnet multicast broadcast running from my Onyx lighting desk which was for some reason affecting the Baldrick. Turning of ARTNET multicast fixed it immediately but it a took a few days of fiddling to finally realise what was going on. We had a lamp blow on a moving head which exploded glass everywhere internally. Hours meter was only on 600 but I suspect it had been reset on before I bought it on marketplace. So I cleaned it up on the roof and replaced the lamps in all 4 moving heads just in case. Should've just done that as a matter of course when I first bought them. At least now I know they have properly recorded hours on them! We had low crowds until the week before Christmas. Once school holidays started the numbers built. The last 2 days were pretty nuts and almost a the max capacity I'd want here. Lots and lots of people coming through. We did notice this year that people were staying for the whole 27 min show. In the past they've only stayed for 10-15 mins cos they were touring lots of lights in the area. It's a big effort doing such a long show that's a full production but it was worthwhile. We only just got the show up and running in time and I didn't quite get the moving heads added to all the songs before we launched on Dec 12. I managed to get them programmed on all songs by Dec 19. Certainly it's lots of layers of things to get going but it's lots of fun to see it all working well and people enjoying the show. We had one noise complaint although we were being super careful with volume. But I tried to do my best to keep it at acceptable levels. It's hard when people turn up at 11pm and turn their stereo up to full and sing out the car windows haha. Anyway was a great year. Will be interesting to see what happens in 2026!.