Winterfest

Winterfest was Cedar Fair’s first undertaking of a large holiday themed event, similar in size to the Halloween events they had been running at various parks for years. California’s Great America was the first park to get the event in 2016, and as a result, came with its own share of obstacles and challenges we had to overcome and figure out in order to launch something brand new of this scale. The turnaround time from Halloween Haunt to Winterfest was just over three weeks, and the entire park had to be changed over with a crew of just 30 people, most of which did not work full time. The major technical infrastructure we installed the first year included a park-wide lighting and audio network, to run intelligent lighting along the buildings along with music and audio cues run through the park speakers and brand new ones installed to beef up the system. Lighting control was initially run using ETC’s Mosaic architectural controller, but eventually switched to Avolites Titan due to difficulties in integration between the existing park fiber network and ETC’s software. It consisted of 48 universes of intelligent control, all routed and assigned to various boxes dropped throughout the park in any way we desired. The audio network was a brand new QSYS system, with full control available from anywhere in the park with just a computer. All of this technical infrastructure was installed while also building eight other shows and several other experiences, and fully transforming areas of the park to fit the holiday theme.