INSO 2026 Opening Ceremony

Lighting design, technical drawings, pre-visualisation and timecoded show files for the opening ceremony of the third International Nuclear Science Olympiad, held at the King Faisal Conference Center at King Abdulaziz University in Jeddah on 3 August 2026. Nineteen countries, around 120 students and specialists, under the patronage of Prince Saud bin Mishal bin Abdulaziz — and the first time the Olympiad has been held in the Middle East.

Everything except the desk. This was the full design package delivered without show operation: the plot, the drawing set, the pre-visualisation and the programmed, timecoded show — handed over for the client’s own operator to run on the night. That changes what the deliverable has to be. A show you will run yourself can carry loose ends in your head; a show someone else runs cannot. Every cue had to be legible to an operator who had not been in the room while it was built.

Signed off before a single fixture moved. The design was pre-visualised in Depence and approved with the client before setup started, so what arrived on site was a confirmed plot rather than a proposal. That is the point of pre-vis on a job like this: the argument about what the show looks like happens in software, on a schedule where changes are free, instead of on the floor with a crew standing by and a ceremony date that cannot move.

Built to be handed over. Timecoded throughout, with the cue structure and the show file laid out to be picked up cleanly by an operator who inherited it rather than wrote it — labelled, ordered, and matching the drawings, so the paperwork on site described the rig that was actually hanging.