Come dusk, Floriade will transform into a haunting dreamscape of light, colour and sound.

Around 1500 handmade lanterns stencilled with poppies are strung across a sea of blooms this year while light and smoke dance across the lake for this year's NightFest.

Projections of aircraft swoop over beds of sleeping blossoms and a red cross blinks like a beacon into the night to commemorate 100 years since the Anzacs landed at Gallipoli Cove.

Richard Neville is senior designer at MandyLights, the company behind the installations.

His team have worked from sundown to sun-up for the last month to illuminate the park.

"We start planning for the year at the previous NightFest so we've already started thinking about next year's," Mr Neville said.

"Every year there's different lights, there's completely different looks. Where you might have seen a big installation last year, this year there might be something static. Every year we try and pick a new area of the park to feature and do a major installation."

Of the Nerang Pool installation, Mr Neville said designers had "literally taken the theme [of Reflection] and run with it".

A mirrored lotus surrounded by 47 searchlights will be the focal point of the light shows.

Chief Minister Andrew Barr hopes to see more than 35,000 people flow through the gates over the five nights.

He said the extra night a tourist stayed to see the light installations injected millions into the territory economy.

"[With Floriade] we come out of our winter hibernation and we can experience new things," Mr Barr said.

"I think the changing themes week by week of Floriade, and indeed of NightFest, demonstrate innovation and a capacity for change and that's important for an event [like] Floriade, which is 28 years old. NightFest is a bit younger but growing up."

Mr Neville said organisers had taken a more restrained approach to this year's theme out of respect to the Anzacs.

"We took a couple of steps back, whereas in the past we've been really big and flashy. We wanted to pull it back a little bit and create something that was really beautiful," he said

Peter Collas, treasurer of the Returned and Services League of Australia ACT Branch, said the overall effect evoked passages from war poem In Flanders Field in his mind.

"If you have ever been to northern France or in Belgium toward the end of summer you see all these poppies coming out of the ground. [They] became a symbol to [the men fighting] of the lives they were losing, it was almost as if each year those flowers came back the blood of their comrades was coming back up," Mr Collas said.

"This setting is rather reminiscent to me of many of our war graves overseas. They are all different in their own way but they are the same, they just give you that sense of peace and understanding of what has happened. "

NightFest will light up Commonwealth Park from Wednesday until Sunday.