The brief started as a sound file. Ninety minutes of Barnsley veterans reading the names of the fallen, area by area, finishing with the Last Post. More than 2,000 names, taken from war memorials and honour rolls across the borough. Barnsley Council called it The Roses Remember.
I was doing the light. The roses are the three Yorkshire Roses on The Seam in Barnsley town centre, the sculptures that went up last autumn. The tallest is 15 metres, the other two 12. Each one is built the same way, with a floor, an inner layer and an outer layer, and one MadMapper project drives all three.
Nobody is going to stand outside in November for an hour and a half. People will walk up, stay a few minutes and move on. Someone might arrive halfway through Goldthorpe and be gone before the next area starts. So there's no slow build to a big finish, because most people would never see it. Turn up at any minute and the piece has to make sense.
Most of my projection work runs the other way. You plan a shape: an opening, something that grows, a release at the end. Here each section had to stand up on its own.
The recording gave me the structure. Every area opens with the same words, "Remembering the fallen from...", followed by the place. Then the names. Some areas have a handful. Some run for minutes. I left them as they are. A small village with a long list should take longer, and the light shouldn't hurry it along.
The roses are lit red, for the poppies, and during the names the light stays quiet. I tried versions that moved more and they pulled your eye off the people speaking, which is the opposite of what the piece is for.
The edit took longer than the lighting. A recording like this comes with retakes, a cough, a name read twice. I went through the audio and the transcript side by side and cut them out, then checked every area list against the others. A couple looked like duplicates at first glance (they're not, they're different churches and villages). You don't get to correct a name after the night.
The Last Post came out of the main recording and now runs as its own track after the outro, which Barnsley veterans recorded along with the intro. After an hour and a half of voices, it needs nothing else around it.
MadMapper's Conductor chains the lot in order: intro, eighteen sections of names, outro, Last Post. Press go and it runs. On the night I'd rather be watching people than a laptop.
Most commissions want the light to be the thing you look at. This one needed it to sit back while the names are read, and I found that harder to get right than anything with more going on.
The Roses Remember runs every evening on The Seam until Saturday 14 November, starting at 4.30pm and 6.30pm. Stand for a few minutes or for the whole ninety.
