SPECTACLE. Copyright Lighting&Sound America November November 2009 Lighting&Sound America

Transcription

1 SPECTACLE Copyright Lighting&Sound America November November 2009 Lighting&Sound America

2 V I S I O N S O F C A N A D A All images courtesy of AVH Live Creating a sound and light show at the birthplace of Canadian Confederation By: Alan Hardiman Celebrate the Canadian Dream, a sound and light extravaganza projected onto the stone façade of the provincial legislative building in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, began a multi-year summer run on July 2. The premiere of the 22-minute production went off without a hitch, due largely to the intensive planning that went into its creation not to mention a state-of-the-art battery of performance sound and video systems pressed into service for the duration. The production is a sweeping view of Canada s cultural, social, and political achievement, with an emphasis on Prince Edward Island s role in the history and development of the country. After all, it was this very building, Province House, in which the fathers of confederation gathered in 1864 for a historic conference that led to unification of Canada three years later. (The original provinces were Ontario, Quebec, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick; the Northwest Territories were added in 1870, with British Columbia and Prince Edward Island joining in 1871 and 1873, respectively.) It s fitting that the show was designed by the same team Toronto s AVH Live Communications who designed the Spirit of a Country sound and light show staged on the walls of the Parliament Buildings in Ottawa, the nation s capital, which finished its five-year run this September. (The project was seen in the December 2005 issue of LSA.) Projecting and focusing hi-def images on a 120'-wide screen made of stone and glass was only one challenge faced by AVH, particularly since the middle third of the screen is a portico with four imposing Greek columns that protrude some 12' into the audience area. More daunting was the production timeline: AVH received the green light only in mid- February, leaving a scant four months in which to write, design, debug, and mount the show. In view of the fact that funding sources included multiple levels of government as well as private companies ranging from a multimillion dollar international real estate investment firm to local bars and restaurants, and that the production also had to satisfy many different ethnic, language, and cultural groups, each with their own special interests, it s a wonder that script approval was obtained at all. We insisted on having one point person to make the decisions, because, when you re dealing with government, it s hard to achieve consensus otherwise, says Gary Dickens, president of AVH Live Communications. Everyone seems to have their own agenda. The only way to deal with that was to not wait until the show was on the wall of the building for everyone to start complaining, but to build a consultative approach into our process. We November 2009

3 SPECTACLE The images were mapped out on a video grid (previous spread) to fit the exterior. established an advisory group that included university professors and local historians, and our writers traveled to PEI to talk to these people. In this way, we were able to create our own interpretation grid, and what it said was, in effect, We as a group are agreed that we re going to touch on this, this, and this; here are our priorities, and this is the information we need to get across about each of these events or subjects. Our writers, Theresa Sears and David Switzer, did a great job in this interview process, Dickens adds. and develop in a very short time frame. We were able to come back and say, Yes, we wanted to do that; we all agreed we were going to do that. Here are the images that support it, and here s what we say about it, and, yes, we all vetted everything along the way. That was a very important approach, because of the diverse nature of our stakeholders. AVH was concerned that some interest groups weren t represented adequately in the finished production, so, during the fine-tuning period, they even more effective, says Randy Brown, AVH s creative director. To prove the point, Dickens notes that Province House wasn t the original choice for the site at the outset; Tourism PEI had suggested a site on Charlottetown s revitalized waterfront that is often used for large public festivals and concerts. We took one look at it and said no. But, on our way through the city, we had seen Province House, and we thought that it would be an interesting place to stage the show. The challenge was the porticos and the columns that are on the building; it wasn t just about getting the projectors to converge and focus. We don t have one continuous space to project images on. How do you get around that? To most people, Province House was just another old building, he adds. We re hearing now that people are seeing it as the show portrays it, as the seat of confederation, at the very root of Canada, and they feel really emotional about it. To maximize impact and deal with the inherent technical limitations of the building as a projection surface, Brown decided at the outset that the show would be produced in high The servers are set up in a basement room that looks the same as it did 150 years ago, water leaks and all. It s like a dungeon. You re usually looking for computer gear to be housed in a pristine temperature- and humidity-controlled environment, but when it rains, water runs in through the wall. The equipment has to be very robust to survive that. Dickens They drew up the interpretation grid that clearly connects the interviews to comments we make in the copy for the voiceover, and what picture is showing to support that, and how it supports the topic that we all agreed on. In a pre-emptive way, we went about handling what might have been criticized later, and tied the advisory group to a set of variables about the show that we were going to honor, replaced six non-specific cover shots with others that had more significance for one or another of these groups. We re pretty good at managing our clients projects for them, whether they know it or not. After 40 years in the business, we re used to the fact that they come to us thinking they need something very specific, yet, by the end of the day, we ve arrived somewhere else that s definition and projected using dual redundant Barco FLM HD14 projectors, optimized for wide-screen applications that demand high brightness and fitted with TLD+HD high-definition, high-brightness lenses for even better image quality. Projecting the same program from both projectors with a slight amount of warp introduced to compensate for their lenses being some 19 apart November 2009 Lighting&Sound America

4 yields a brighter program, although, according to John Smith, the projection and sound designer, the program looks great from just a single projector. There was little imperfection in the horizontal linearity, so I used a bit of warping just to tweak in the one side, says Smith. We ve got 120' for a single 1920 [pixel] image, and that s way more than we probably should have done, but it still looks great. Everything we created was in full HD, and that really helped us, says Brown It was exciting trying to tune created a video grid at the exact dimensions to fill a 1920 x 1080 frame, and then projected it onto the building with a single projector in order to line it up exactly square with respect to the projection position. Brown and the video producers used that grid in producing their content, mapping the building s architectural features onto it. The registration they achieved was tight enough that each of the building s front windows could be lit from outside by projecting onto the drawn window shades (or coroplast inserts where shades were designed the show so that the building would help us tell the story, rather than being a sword hanging over our head, Brown says. Each wing on either side of the central columns was used for the main title and end credit rolls, with English on the left and French on the right. The A-frame over the columns was featured whimsically in a few places in one sequence that has become an audience favorite, a waterfall of world-famous PEI potatoes comes tumbling out of it. We didn t shoot any new footage Left: A tribute to Anne of Green Gables. Right: Many of the images are complex, many-layered affairs. the video all through the production process both our selection of images, and optimizing the projectors for wide-screen projection from a distance of well under 100'. One wonderful thing we had going for us was the warp module in the Barco projectors; it allowed us to compensate for the forward portico and the pillars on the face of the building. Using the warp module, we were able to alter the image and soften the jump from the front to the back, which really helped with the legibility of the images. It was essential to incorporate the building as a contributor to the show, to take advantage of its physical architecture. To that end, Smith not available) in order to simulate lights being switched on inside. People have said they liked the lights coming on inside the building in timed sequence, and asked how we did that, says Brown. The fact is, we didn t. We just projected that effect onto the windows from outside. We also projected images of lights onto the columns and fit images between and behind them. The trick was not to let anyone know what were real lights and what was video, because there was so much content. At different points in the show, we silhouetted the whole fascia to become symbolic of the legislature, and of the role of government in the coming together of Canada. We for the show; it s all either stock footage or animations that we created, says Brown. All the stock footage is HD, so it s pretty new. Some of the images of the island that were supplied to us by Charlottetown or PEI Tourism were SD, so we put them into smaller windows within the larger image that we created using Final Cut Pro. During some segments of the show, we have more than 20 layers of images, and that had an impact on rendering time. We were using the highest-end machines, but it still took a long time to chug through that and build those pieces. Between the design and the editing, we worked nine weeks straight, without a day off. November 2009

5 SPECTACLE To most people, Province House was just another old building. We re hearing now that people are seeing it as the show portrays it, as the seat of confederation, at the very root of Canada, and they feel really emotional about it. Dickens We are projecting in 9 x 16, but we don t use the full height of the aspect ratio, he adds We mask off the ground side at the bottom of the HD frame, and that represents almost a third of the frame. Because we have to mask it out, we lose some of the brightness. So with two 14K Barcos stacked in a dual redundant configuration, we are able to bolster up and get enough oomph out of the images. It isn t a custom fit by any means to the true 9 x 16 aspect ratio of HD it s actually more like 6 x 16. The show runs under the control of an ELC Showstore xlan, which slaves dual redundant Coolux Pandoras Box media servers via Cat5 cable. Digital video output from the servers is split via a dual-input Analog Way Trident DVI213 DVI distribution amplifier to the Barco projectors. Smith notes that the DVI signal is driven by copper cable a distance of 170': A lot of people still aren t aware that you can do that effectively with Analog Way copper DVI cable. Otherwise, we re limited to either a short 10' copper run, unless we go to fiber optic cable. The Showstore is our main show control. Everything was programmed on a grandma Light lighting console [from MA Lighting], says Smith Once we were satisfied with the sync between the lights, the audio, and the video in the complete show on the grandma, we loaded it into the Showstore, which is essentially a DMX and Art-Net recorder. The Showstore also outputs conventional DMX to control the moving heads and LED fixtures as well, Using a simple ELC AC612 X UB remote control, the operator can press a button that triggers startup mode, causing the media servers to output a grid, fire the lamps on the moving lights, and put a soft glow on all the LED fixtures, he adds. This lets the local techs know that everything is working fine. Another button, show park, loads the main video into RAM and positions all the lights to where they should be. The next button is show go. It s about as simple as it gets, he says. Lighting and sound Stereo audio from the servers is bussed to a Mackie 1604 mixer, where it is distributed via three stereo BSS 966 equalizers to a high resolution self-powered loudspeaker system consisting of four Meyer UPA- 1Ps (front and rear L-R stereo) and two Meyer 650-P subwoofers. We did some audio tests back in the planning stage, and found that stereo sound filled the whole front lawn of the building very well, says Smith. Given the tight budget, stereo seemed more than adequate. Our composer, Glenn Morley, spent two or three days on the site, manipulating the mix of his score to make it sound even bigger than it already was. With the exception of four Philips Color Kinetics ColorBlast 12 LED fixtures mounted up on the second floor balcony, all lighting, sound, and projection equipment is wheeled into place by a three-person crew, plugged in, and run every night. It takes about an hour to set up and an hour to strike. During the show, the projectors are housed in a small portable gazebo that affords some protection from the elements. The loudspeakers are mounted on 8' stands placed unobtrusively in among the trees that line the site, while the subwoofers are Left: A diagram of the audio and video wiring. Right: The conduit layout. November 2009 Lighting&Sound America

6 positioned symmetrically in the circular driveway, along with six Martin MAC 575 Krypton moving heads fitted with custom gobos and watertight connectors. An additional 14 ColorBlast 12s round out Dave Eveson s lighting rig. They ve got a limited operating budget, so we had to design a system that wouldn t require 10 guys for six hours, says Dickens Built in 1843, Province House is a designated national historic site. Because the building is a designated site, we couldn t do anything that might interfere with its appearance during the daytime when the show s not running, adds Dickens. So we Many of the images are iconic evocations of Canadian life. The above image evokes the country s archeological past. had to create an environment for the local crew, whom we trained to set up the show each and every night. The servers are set up in a basement room that looks the same as it did 150 years ago, water leaks and all. It s like a dungeon. You re usually looking for computer gear to be housed in a pristine temperatureand humidity-controlled environment, but when it rains, water runs in through the wall. The equipment has to be robust to survive that, he notes. The Barco projectors weigh over 400lbs, so storing them in the basement was out of the question. We brought in a metal shipping container and parked it about 70' away in an alleyway, for storage of projectors and sound, and lighting equipment, quadruple-padlocked for security. Needless to say, running conduit for data cables and power to all the equipment was another hurdle that had to be cleared, especially in view of the building s protected status. AVH consulted extensively with the local public works group to lay the conduit in a non-intrusive way, repaving the driveway and reseeding the grass where ground was broken. In addition to the main lighting, LED Christmas lights were strung in rows of stately trees at each side of the building, ranging forward toward the audience. During a Christmas scene in the show, they are illuminated. They are also illuminated strategically in a fireworks sequence of the show depicting Canada Day celebrations. We had to increase the area of the experience because we were limited in our projection surface on the building, Dickens explains. What was the reaction on opening night? Everybody loved the show. A couple who had been standing across the street came over with tears in their eyes. They had to compose themselves to ask, What is this? This is so amazing, so beautiful; what s this all about? People on the government side were blown away by how all the stakeholders were fairly represented, and how we covered the Micmacs, the Acadians, the French Canadians, the English in a balanced treatment, Dickens says. Another comment from people who have seen it more than once is that every time they see it, they see something new in it. Even our client has said that. There s something there for nine-year olds, and there s something there for 80-year olds who have lived their whole lives there. To view Celebrate the Canadian Dream in HD on the web, go to: EcD2f9f_U&hd=1. November 2009