A SEA of colours washed over the central business district on Saturday night to kick off the Bathurst Winter Festival.
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Illuminations could be seen right across the festival precinct and were either projections on buildings or on the ground.
The centrepiece was the display on Bathurst Court House, which officially launched at around 6pm, but there were also creative projections in Court House Lane, Machattie Park, the fernery and on the Cathedral of St Michael and St John in Keppel Street.
For the fourth time, the illuminations were provided by the team at ESEM Projects, a media and design business from Sydney with a lot experience in digital storytelling.
The theme of this year's illuminations was 'cosmic paradise', which led to a lot of space-related content in the illuminations.
ESEM's director, Michael Killalea, said that his team was "very pleased" with how the illuminations were delivered and later received by the crowd.
Each year, ESEM tries to find ways to make the illuminations interactive so people can enjoy them in different ways.
The silent disco on the court house lawn returned with popularity, while a new game in Court House Lane, called Rain Run, garnered quite a bit of attention.
"It's a pretty simple game, but just that you can play it with other people makes it really fun," Mr Killalea said.
People can also win prizes if they top the leader board for the day.
The game will be operating daily until the end of the festival, meaning people have many chances to get themselves to the top of the list.
Another new addition to the illuminations was a project called Ways of Seeing, which required a lot of community participation to make possible.
"As well as the things up in that main precinct, there is one more precinct down on Keppel Street in front of the library that we did with local artists, Nicole Welch and Henry Simmons," Mr Killalea said, explaining that it involved a lot of digital portraiture.
"It's quite different from the rest of the festival in that it is very much portrait-based, so it is local faces, local stories and local artists."
Along with the other illuminations, Ways of Seeing can be viewed between sunset and 10pm daily until the end of the winter festival.
All of the illuminations developed for the two-week event took around six months to create.
"We really hope people enjoy it. We really like doing this stuff," Mr Killalea said.
"What is good about Bathurst is that the community really seems to appreciate it."