In
a season filled with holiday light displays, Descanso Gardens in La Cañada
Flintridge, Los Angeles has debuted “Enchanted: Forest of Light,” a unique,
interactive nighttime experience. Visitors enjoy a one-mile walk through eight
distinct lighting displays in some of the Gardens’ most beloved areas. 6 x grandMA2
onPC stations were selected to control the lighting and interactivity for the
majority of the displays. Descanso Gardens is a botanic garden open to the
public and nationally accredited as a “museum of living collections.”
“Descanso
wanted to do something for the holidays and looked at a lot of different
arboretums and botanical gardens around the country and really liked what we
did at The Morton Arboretum in Chicago,” says Chris Medvitz of Lightswitch, who
served as creative director and lighting designer for “Enchanted: Forest of
Light.” Lightswitch has designed The Morton Arboretum’s holiday illumination,
now in its fourth year.
“Descanso
adopted a similar creative brief that took more of a nature plus light art
installation approach instead of a more traditional holiday lighting approach”,
he explains. “They wanted something between a fine-art installation and
something that would be unlike the other traditional holiday light experiences
around Southern California. It was important that this was secular and not
culturally specific so it would not exclude any of the myriad demographics in
the Southern California market.”
“Additionally,
central to the approach was to develop and curate the various experiences along
the one-mile path from the environments they exist in,” Medvitz continues. “Most
guests who attend have never been to Descanso Gardens before, and the goal is
to expose them to it in a way that encourages them to return during the day at
other times of the year.” Long-time grandMA users, Medvitz and programmer Chris
Herman chose half-a-dozen grandMA2 onPC stations to run lighting displays for
various areas of the Gardens. 4Wall Entertainment Lighting provided the lighting
and systems fabrication for the project.
“We
knew that several of the experiences were going to be interactive or
timecode-driven,” says Medvitz. “We needed some sort of control system that
could handle a lot of guest-driven triggers and provide flexibility in terms of
what those inputs were and how we handled that trigger information. We also
wanted to minimize the type and variety of control equipment on site: Despite
the large geography of the project there weren’t that many lights in any one
area.”
“The
grandMA2 onPC solution made a lot of sense – the hardware is small and could
fit inside the control bunkers that protected it from the elements; being
consistent with the gear also minimized the need for spares. This allowed us to
use a grandMA2 light for programming while paring back to the smaller consoles
for the run of the show and having a common show file across the entire show.” Chris
Herman notes that MA’s “easy to use timecode and multiple I/Os really help us
achieve what we want artistically. The flexibility of the MA systems means we
can spend more time focusing on the artistry and the experience and less on how
to make things work.”
The
Gardens’ Lightwave Lake featured several guest-driven interactive controls, in
the form of buttons and joysticks, which allowed them to control moving lights
across the lake as well as the speed and pattern of media playing on “digital
reeds.” The reeds were built using LED pixel tape and were intermingled with
natural reeds on the shoreline. grandMA2 onPC handled a mix of DMX, Art-Net and
sACN protocols for the lake displays.
“From
my perspective, the MA control systems have been rock solid and were a solid
choice for this project,” says Medvitz. “The
scaleability of the system and having just one show file that can be easily
updated from year to year make MA control systems a great choice for what is
expected to be an annual event,” adds Herman.
A.C.T
Lighting, Inc. is the exclusive distributor of MA Lighting products in the USA
and Canada.
Photos:
© Jake Fabricius
