Vivid Sydney

Sydney has a festival/event called Vivid Sydney that runs for several weeks.  The Circular Quay and The Rocks area of Sydney is alive with color as they light up the city including small displays, buildings, and the sky.

View from our Window

The first weekend was pretty rainy...so we sat in our apartment and watched the Opera House and some of the buildings downtown shine in a light show of vibrant color.  We just turned off the lights and watched out the window.  I was impressed.  We were treated to the show every night (including week nights) during the event.  The other fun treat was watching the fireworks shot off from a barge on the water (a different place on different nights.  Australians love their fireworks.

Coming into Circular Quay

The second week/weekend we walked around the displays. We did find that walking around during a week night was MUCH better than a weekend due to the crowds.  They were numbered and ranged from the amazing Opera House/downtown buildings displays to something as basic as an image projected on the side of a building or the underside of a bridge like you would see from a classroom overhead projector. There were more than I expected and we tried to find all of them.  They handed out maps and each display had a description of the artist and what they were trying to portray.


There were several displays that were interactive and we thought those were a ton of fun.  One had LED lights that reacted to your movement inside the circle (of course when we went back later it was "broken" because the motion cameras were all pointed to the sky or ground...but after we fixed them it worked again...got to love having engineers around).
I liked the one that made the walkway under the train tracks light up due to the vibration from the train.  There were also light "people" who reacted to your touch and one display that reacted to sound.  Other displays were truly interactive like one that you had to power by riding a bike or a virtual paint canvas on the side of a building with people able to "throw" paint up for a minute and see the splash of color appear on their creation.
There were several displays that were just really neat with the light and the mood they created. It was a photographers delight.  Poor Matthew had to stand in the chill while I joined the throngs of others with tripods and timers to take the perfect night pictures.  Thank you for my wonderful birthday gift mom, dad and Katie...as you can see...it was put to use. :)

 There were 2 shows that we watched.  One was the Fire Dance and the other was the Customs House Presentation. The fire show was probably Matthew's favorite. We watched it from different spots around the area...pretty much everytime we could while we were walking around and even planned our ferry trips around the show.  They created a fire dance to one pop and one classical song.  It was impressive.  Because of the long pause between the songs, I jumped when the classical one started (along with most others) with a BOOM.  It was so good.  We decided that the little movable heads that looked like little robots that spat fire would be a great thing to have at the house for a party (all in the safest way of course).   Matthew actually took a small video from his phone (inserted below).  I think I mentioned somewhere that we enjoyed the fire dance. :)

The other "show" was a repeating presentation on the Customs House. It was sponsored by Intel and we were laughing about the blatant advertising but after seeing it...we understood while they were touting about sponsorship.
The outside of the Customs House took on an animation.  They spun the clock on the house and it really did look like it was getting older and older until pieces were falling off.  It was impressive how real it looked.  Then they spun the column and it looked three dimensional like the corners were actually spinning.  I don't know how to put it into words but I have never seen anything like it look so real.

What a fun event!!  We will miss it once the lights are turned off.