Kmart & Target
Store Managers Conference
Client
Kmart & Target
Venue
The Cloud
Location
Auckland
When Kmart and Target needed a corporate audio visual production for their Store Managers Conference, the brief was to bring New Zealand's Southern Lights indoors. We took on the full technical direction and built an aurora environment inside The Cloud on the Auckland CBD waterfront.
The Aurora Australis is a hard thing to recreate. It moves, it shifts colour, it fills the whole sky. To put it convincingly over a room of store managers, we treated The Cloud as a single canvas and engineered light and projection across the entire space, rather than pointing fixtures at a stage and hoping.
Challenge
Recreate New Zealand's Southern Lights inside The Cloud, a long waterfront venue with a sweeping curved ceiling. An aurora is not a static backdrop. It needs slow colour movement and a sense of depth across the whole room, so the environment had to read from every seat, not just front of house. The job was to make a conference space feel like standing under the southern sky.
Engineering response
We worked the venue as one continuous canvas. The curved ceiling of The Cloud was projection-mapped so the aurora could wash and travel across the architecture itself. To carry the colour into the air below, we cut custom colour gobos for the moving heads, matching the greens and violets of the Aurora Australis, and ran a high-density rig of stage fixtures through the space. Layering projection on the ceiling against moving light in the room gave the aurora its depth and movement, so the effect sat around the audience rather than in front of them. Our crew designed the plot, built the colour and handled the technical direction end to end.
Outcome
The Southern Lights filled The Cloud. The room sat inside the effect, and the conference closed on a moment that read like the real southern sky. An aurora environment built across the whole space, not a backdrop pointed at a stage.