As a lighting look for Jeff Lynne’s ELO, the lighting designer, Tim Routledge, wanted a quickly deployable array of Tungsten bulbs arranged in drops of various lengths and types of bulbs. The size of the effect, called ‘The Bulb Cloud’ was 6 metres x 3 metres and it was logical that it should be made up from 4 identical pieces. Each piece required a Socapex input and a sophisticated patch so that The Cloud could produce subtle non-geometric patterns. With each piece having 54 pendant drops, the challenge was how to wire up all of the channels in a sensible way given that there would be 9 bulbs on each Socapex circuit. This was achieved using a 3 pin lighting connector designed to plug into a mating commoning block, fortunately the ‘numbers’ all worked out – the capacity of the system matched the Socapex well and it was possible to common the 9 bulb circuits.

Care and attention was given to the choice of components, an extremely flexible wire was found for the pendants, quality brass fittings for the lamp holders and each bulb was given a shatterproof coating.