Frightfully Brilliant: ADJ Lighting Transforms Calgary’s Heritage Park For Ghouls Night Out 2025
Hundreds of ADJ luminaires were utilized by local production company Digital Media Integrations to transform the Heritage Park historical village in Calgary, Canada for its annual Ghouls Night Out Halloween event. A combination of moving heads and static wash fixtures was used to create a spooky atmosphere throughout the park, with moody colors, crisp GOBO projections, striking silhouettes and theatrical strobe flashes all contributing to the immersive experience enjoyed by guests.
Established in 1964, Heritage Park has grown into one of Calgary’s premier tourist attractions. It brings to life the history of Western Canada, covering the 1860s to the 1950s, through period buildings, exhibits, and costumes that give visitors the opportunity to experience life in bygone times. The park’s historical collection comprises 50,000 artifacts and it features 180 exhibits and service structures, half of which are relocated originals, while the rest are replicas or analogues. The site is also home to the Gasoline Alley Museum, one of the world’s largest public collections of antique vehicles and oil- and gas-related artifacts.
The annual Ghouls Night Out is a family-friendly Halloween experience that sees Heritage Park transformed for the spooky season. It features fun games, hands-on crafts, costumed characters, live entertainment, and lots of photo opportunities. In 2025 it ran across four evenings from Thursday October 23 thru Sunday October 26 and is the only time in the park’s calendar when visitors are admitted after dark. This means that additional lighting is necessary not only to add to the event’s atmosphere but also to make the village safe for public access in the evening.
For 2025, the park’s events team – headed up by Special Events Director, Warren Cummins – wanted to raise the bar in terms of the AV production for Ghouls Night Out. Warren knew Dustin Milne, owner of Digital Media Integrations, through the local events industry community and was aware of his company’s work on Ghostbusters movie promotions as well as his own home Halloween displays that had gained coverage in local news outlets in recent years due to their impressive scale! Dustin was approached in June of this year to put together a proposal to serve as the event’s exclusive production contractor, supplying all the audiovisual equipment for the event, which was ultimately accepted. Dustin and his team spent 12 days at Heritage Park setting up and running tech for the events, which welcomed approximately 3,000 visitors each night.
“Having known Dustin and his work quality for several years now, it was an easy choice for Heritage Park,” comments Warren. “As a community Halloween event running for the past several years, Ghouls Night Out needed a significant upgrade. Dustin has the tech and skills to do that. Our site he lit was approximately 50 acres in size with every piece in his arsenal of gear in use. His commitment to excellence and work ethic made him the best choice. To help out Heritage Park, as we are a charitable organization, he also donated a significant amount of equipment rental. The lighting elevated the event to a professional level that the park has not experienced before. I daresay even Dustin has not done anything quite so elaborate before and he knocked out a home run for Heritage Park!”
To illuminate Heritage Park’s main town square, Dustin and his team utilized a combination of Focus Flex L19 and Focus Flex L7 LED wash-zoom luminaires. Featuring nineteen and seven 40-Watt RGBL color-mixing LEDs, respectively, these potent fixtures feature motorized zoom which delivers everything from a tight beam to a wide wash. The fixtures were rigged to a series of truss goalposts that were set up on the second-floor balconies of the buildings surrounding the main thoroughfare. Zoomed out to their widest beam angle, the fixtures were able to fill the streets with vibrant, slowly moving washes in a variety of appropriate colors. In addition, they were utilized to illuminate two separate performance areas where Halloween skits took place at designated times throughout each evening.
“The Focus Flex L19 and L7 are both really nice fixtures,” comments Dustin. “They are very bright, even when zoomed right out to cover a wide area like we had them for Ghouls Night Out. They’re also very versatile; for this project, all we needed were broad washes in saturated colors and nice warm white clarity for illuminating the performers, but for other events we’ve used their full pixel-mapping capability to create some very impressive effects. Of course, that really eats up channels… but it does look cool!”
Alongside the wash fixtures on the truss goal posts were Focus Spot 6Z and Focus Profile automated luminaires, utilized to overlay GOBO patterns on the background washes. The Focus Spot 6Z is a feature-packed, compact moving head spot fixture powered by a 300-watt cool white LED. The Focus Profile is the Focus Series’ flagship model; powered by a 400-watt LED engine it delivers up to 20,000 lumens of output and offers a full suite of beam-shaping tools, including precision framing shutters and CMY + CTO color mixing.
“I love the profiles, they are awesome,” enthuses Dustin. “The framing shutters are really useful, and I love the selection of breakup GOBO patterns. Most importantly, they’re really bright, especially for an LED engine, which means we don’t have to worry about replacing bulbs and it keeps the power draw down. That was a particular consideration for Ghouls Night Out, as the Heritage Park is made up of all these period buildings without electricity, so we had to run everything from generators we brought in for the event.”
The fixture utilized in the greatest quantity for this production was the 12P HEX IP. Powered by 12 x 12-watt RGBAW+UV color-mixing LEDs and offering a beam angle of 25°, this compact and robust IP65-rated par is the ideal event production utility fixture. Dustin and his team utilized them to illuminate windows from within, creating striking silhouettes, as well as to illuminate featured props. Pairs of fixtures were also mounted to truss pillars and used to light the winding main pathway that leads into the village.
“The 12P HEX IP is a real workhorse,” states Dustin. “We used our entire inventory of 140 fixtures on this project, and they all performed flawlessly. The color mixing is great, and I really appreciate the addition of the UV element as it gives us added flexibility. One of the areas at Ghouls Night Out was an ‘Alien Garden’ and the venue team wanted that lit with UV, which we could easily do simply using our standard pars. The fact that they are IP65-rated also makes them super flexible; we had rain hats ready for the other fixtures, but we could just set and forget the pars.”
Completing the line-up of fixtures used for the event were Focus Spot 5Z moving heads, which were rigged to select truss pillars along the entrance walkway to add GOBO projections, and Jolt 300 LED-powered strobe/wash units, which illuminated the village’s train station. This was utilized as a haunted house, and the Jolt fixtures bathed it in atmospheric colors while also adding periodic strobe flashes to simulate lightning strikes.
Control was provided via an NX2 console from ADJ’s sister company Obsidian Control Systems. Lighting Programmer Joseph Wolf created a time-coded show which ran throughout the event, running a variety of looks across the different themed zones as well as automatically triggering lighting cues for the regular performances. This meant that a lighting operator wasn’t required to manually run the lighting for four hours each night.
Through the creative vision of Digital Media Integrations and the versatile performance of ADJ’s lighting technology, Heritage Park’s Ghouls Night Out 2025 was transformed into a truly immersive Halloween experience. The combination of high-output, feature-rich fixtures and intelligent control delivered both atmosphere and functionality across the sprawling historic site. Demonstrating how professional-grade lighting can elevate community events, this project showcased the reliability, flexibility, and creative potential of ADJ’s product range in bringing large-scale themed environments to life.
Event
Ghouls Night Out
Venue
Heritage Park
1900 Heritage Dr. S.W. Calgary, AB, Canada T2V 2X3
www.heritagepark.ca
Project Manager
Dustin Milne
Assistant Project Manager
Aaman Merali
Lighting Programmer
Joseph Wolf
Production Crew
Micah Agard
Brayden Tang
Jatinpall Dhillon
Hayden Ly
Alvin Chu
Noah Dougherty
Rob Dougherty
Audiovisual Supplier
Digital Media Integrations
www.dmintegrations.ca
Photography
Leya Russell
ADJ Gear List
140 x 12P HEX IP
10 x Jolt 300
8 x Focus Profile
8 x Focus Spot 6Z
8 x Focus Spot 5Z
8 x Focus Flex L19
8 x Focus Flex L7
