Artistic director and executive producer David Atkins said the initial set up for White Night Ballarat began on Monday, before the real work started on Wednesday. 

“We’re moving camp this week and pretty much everyone will be in Ballarat from Wednesday evening all the way through to Monday,” he said.

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The event involves art projections onto seven different buildings and in three lane ways, along with an outdoor cinema in Camp Street. 

“It is a huge amount of projection equipment and screens across the sites,” Mr Atkins said. 

“And while some of the works are projection works, some are physical pieces such as the White Knight Messenger, which is a five and a half metre high automated puppet that takes seven puppeteers to manipulate and move.

“It is a massive piece and that will be travelling up and down the different streets.”

Other big pieces include Carla O’Brien’s angel wings and Love This Way installation, which has about 17 pieces of neon light attached to it, and 40 possums with glowing red eyes among the trees. 

The area for White Night Ballarat will be about 40 per cent of the Melbourne precinct, while the programming will be half its size with 45 items in Ballarat. 

But Mr Atkins said Ballarat would boast a similar number of projections in a smaller space, meaning crowds wouldn’t have to walk far to catch the breathtaking sites. 

To light up the city, Mr Atkins estimated about 26 projectors will be used overall, along with two LED screens next to the Lydiard Street stage and a large LED screen for the outdoor cinema. 

“We’re using a mixture of digital projectors and still projectors,” Mr Atkins said.

“There are a number of towers being built on the corner of Sturt and Lydiard Streets and a couple in Lydiard Street, and we’re also using buildings to project out of.”

While a lot of the equipment – especially projection equipment – has been brought up from Melbourne, some has also come from local suppliers.

Mr Atkins believed the hard work would pay off and was expecting a great result for Ballarat.

”The one thing we can’t calculate, having never done it before in a regional city, is just how many people we are likely to see,” he said.