The award-winning Rys och Mys (Thrill and Chill) festival returned this year to light up the dark autumn evenings in Varberg, Sweden. The celebration featured numerous interactive and inspiring light installations that illuminated the city – creating a sense of fun and joy for visitors of all ages. After last year’s Rys och Mys, we shared how Lighting Designer Johan Röklander used Rosco Image Spot® fixtures to illuminate dark walkways throughout Varberg with captivating gobo projections. Johan contacted us to let us know that the same Image Spots he used last year are performing similar duties this year with new gobos. He also shared how he used the increased brightness of Rosco's new Image Spot® HO fixtures to project bright and vivid images on building façades.
This year’s festival revolved around the theme “The Enchanted City” as it turned the city center and the historic Varberg Fortress into a magical place filled with lights and color. Johan noted how the Image Spot HO fixtures enabled him to “find other locations than we had done before with longer distances. Either that, or we were able to use greater dispersion with wider lenses and still get high luminance.”
The autumnal Rys och Mys festival celebrates all of the local fall holidays, so it isn’t uncommon to see Halloween and other holiday gobos projected together. A perfect example of this is how Johan mounted three of the IP65-rated Image Spot HO fixtures in the city square to illuminate the Sparbankshuset building with bright and crisp images of stars, a spiderweb, and hearts.
Another festival highlight included charming and colorful projections of children’s drawings onto the façade of one of the buildings inside the city’s historic fortress area. Johan used artwork that was created by local children to design three Rosco Custom Glass Gobos.
Johan relied on the bright output from three Image Spot HO fixtures to bring out the rich and saturated colors of the gobo images. “The extra strength of the light allows us to project deeper colors on more difficult surfaces,” he said. “This year, children have painted hands, houses, and feet that would light up a brick façade. But with less brightness, the colors would not have been so clear.”
Johan Röklander is a lighting designer at TRS Consulting and a professor of lighting design at Jönköping University in Jönköping, Sweden. To learn more about his work, you can visit trsconsulting.se, or you can also follow @johan_roklander on Instagram. For more information about the products Johan used to create the bright and colorful projections for Rys och Mys, please explore the Image Spot HO and Custom Gobo product pages on the Rosco website.