Mediamation

Los Alumbrados, the festival of lights that coincides with the Christmas season in Colombia's culture, has long been a "big deal" in this part of the world, but the 2009 version has made a very big splash, thanks in part to Enttec and Mediamation. The Southern California based Mediamation has provided control system design and execution for water features all over the world, but Technical Project Manager Tim Adams told us this was one of the biggest he'd ever worked on. That may be due to the high number of jets, or the fact that one of them shoots up 30 meters, but it's almost certainly related to the quantity of LED fixtures which were used. Mediamation was subcontracted by Georgia Fountains to provide the control system and on site programming. They also previsualized the fountains in their proprietary Virtual Fountain CAD program. You can see rendered movies of what the job was designed to look like, at this link

Enttec Stuff

Enttec provided two Datagates and two 4 universe licenses of LightFactory for the job. One copy and one Datagate were for the lake, where a live orchestral performance is offered every weekend in December to the accompaniment of the dancing waters. The other installation, across town, is a more interactive one, where children can play in the jets of water as they scurry across a plaza. This helps them beat the heat, during the day, but by night it's lit up in a stunningly beautiful fashion, with colors and shapes that dance as complexly as the jets do. Part of the festival's appeal is the late night socializing which goes on around it, with adults staying out and playing in the town center until predawn hours. This interactive fountain gave them something novel and very exciting to participate in as they made their way around to shop, visit friends, have a drink in a bar or a meal at a late night cafe.

One aspect of Los Alumbrados that makes it unique is that it was the first to incorporate a new capability in LightFactory, one purpose-built for these fountains and others like them to come, in fact. While consulting with Enttec about our Datagates, Mediamation heard about LightFactory and asked us if it could be adapted to fit better with their heavily MIDI-oriented fountain control systems. It was already possible to have MIDI notes trigger LightFactory cues and effects, and this had been the case for years, with hundreds, if not thousands, of LightFactory users employing this technique. The question now was, could MIDI note Velocity or Control Change data proportionally manipulate LightFactory Submasters as well.

Other manufacturers could offer them a MIDI to DMX converter box, but it wouldn't have the ability to control the show in its own right if they went that route. They wanted to be able to merge information from a MIDI sequencer for example, into the prerecorded LightFactory show data, or use values being controlled live via MIDI to interact with and affect things that were created within the lighting program. This would let them design cascade runs and other short duration, rapid fire sequences the way they already did, while allowing them to use far more lights than could previously be employed using a MIDI only scenario. And they'd be able to deal with color and pixel mapping issues in a way more suitable to DMX data, when that was the effect they wanted. Despite the ubiquity of MIDI in the music industry, it has some built-in limitations that make it far less robust for large lighting rigs than DMX, especially when sent over Art-Net.

LightFactory Mods

Dream Solutions Limited (the developer of LightFactory) was brought into the discussion and agreed to make some subtle but very significant modifications to how LightFactory handles MIDI. Because of the production calendar, Mediamation wound up taking this new version of the program down to Colombia to field test it. The fact that they would do this while simultaneously working on one of the largest fountains they'd ever done, in a foreign country, under tightly scheduled conditions didn't worry Adams at all, he said.

The project in Colombia was to consist of two independent but partially linked concepts. One was for big spectacle shows, linked to live or prerecorded music. The other was smaller and more personal in the way the public could interact with it, but also large in the sense that it covered quite a big area of the plaza where it was located. They called these two fountains the "Vida" fountain and the "Interactivas" fountain.

Youtube Video 1
Youtube Video 2

Videos & Links: More Info

The first public launch of "Vida" was December 5th. For it, Tim and his lead programmer David Taylor played MIDI keyboards and mixers to guide the water and the lighting effects in their choreographed interpretation of Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture Watch Video here A live orchestra accompanied it, and there were also fireworks at the end. They did another live show a week later, but most of the times when "Vida" was turned on for 3 shows nightly, it was to prerecorded music. Just because the music was canned, don't think the fountain or the lights were uninspiring. Tim explained that they could put the fountain into a mode where it would dance to the music, by virtue of some patches he created in MAX/MSP. This would let a computer determine what lights would come on and what colors they would be, based on sound frequencies in the audio feed.

Partial Equipment List for the "Vida" fountain

• A rear arc of 49 water switch jets, each with a Color Kinetics Color Blast 12
• A center spiral of 43 water switch jets, each with a Color Kinetics Color Blast 12
• A center jet reaching heights of around 50 meters, with 3 Color Reach 325 lights
• Two "CO2 explosion" jets, each with 3 Color Reach 325 lights
• A water screen that is used to project video from a BARCO Projector #FLM HD 14 and Laser animations from a 10 watt LPS RGB laser system.
• A total of 224 RGB LED fixtures
• A total of 672 DMX channels.
• MIDI controllers mapped to submasters, submasters controlling "HUE LTP" function for each fixture

It was using this last feature that the live shows were primarily achieved, but after they concluded, further discussions about how else LightFactory could be harnessed for them led Tim and Dave to realize there is far more to the program that they can tap into on the next project. Some of those tricks were implemented in the other fountain, the "Interactivas" fountain. This fountain is a large interactive play fountain with a total of 395 RGB LED fixtures (1,185 DMX channels), consisting of 3 parts:

Partial Equipment List for the "Interactivas" fountain

• "Cascada"
  This part is a water maze. Each section of jets creates a wall that can be turned on or off to change the path of the maze.
• "Lluvia"
  This area has water umbrellas of different sizes. Each umbrella has an opening through which people can enter and sit below the water coming out.
  This area also had laminar jets that are illuminated via LED in a manner that makes the stream look like an illuminated section of fiber optic filament.
• "Marea"
  This area has small fan jets that move sequentially to create a tidal or wave motion.
  This area also has arcing stream jets that follow the fan jets as they trigger along the length of the area.