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Rapenburg Plaza in Track with Richmond Sound Design

Rapenburg Plaza, the ShowControl Company used to be known as Ground Zero from Amsterdam, showed the visitors and the crew of the Dutch Railroad museum - since the big reopening of museum this summer - what networked ShowControl can mean for museums. The new-build museum is a crossover between a historical museum environment and a themed amusement park. It consists of four individual worlds to enjoy trains and railroads on very different ways.

The first world is an educational audio tour in a beautiful lit and decorated scenery, which teaches the visitors about the starting days of railroads and trains in Holland. The second world is a railroad station with the Orient Express. This is a multimedia environment using lots of video harddisk players and several screens and beamers all around the station. The second world also has a full-scale theatre with a several times a day running theatre show. This show combines live actors, lighting, audio, smoke and a revolving stage all managed by the Medialon ShowControl. This half-hour theatre play is run without any technical personnel at site. The third world is a theme park style dark-ride. Small four persons train wagons are riding a show that takes the audience next to, over and under big steam engines. The show, also run on Medialon ShowControl, consists of almost a hundred special effects and show effects. Ushers to get the audience in and out of the wagons operate this part of the museum. The main ride-operator also starts off the wagons from the loading dock. The pre-show of the ride is done by animatronics. The fourth and last world is the main exhibition hall with all the old trains and steam engines. This part includes a restaurant, a shop, a library, video games and several conference rooms. Here the ShowControl system is used for the overall run of the building including moving lights and all building installation lighting.

Rapenburg Plaza created a show control system based on the Medialon Manager V3 and Ethernet. The network includes three Medialon servers, three AudioBoxes, five Ecue media engines (Lighting), and loads of Kiss Boxes (I/O). All the lighting, sound, SFX, Video and SC equipment work together on the same network. During the programming and installation phase each department could program and handle their units, and the ShowControl programmer could concentrate on integrating all the stuff in the meanwhile.

Rapenburg Plaza was not only the system designer and ShowControl / lighting control supplier for this enormous project. Rapenburg Plaza was also responsible for the lighting design for parts of the museum. Marc Heinz of Rapenburg Plaza design all lighting for the second world, including an all automated theatre performance, which is run several times a day.

Gertjan Dijkstra, one of the responsible employees for maintenance and running of the museum, said: “For us it’s great to have an overall view of the whole building concerning all technical installations. Even when the museum has more the 3000 visitors on one day we still can check if the dark-ride or the theatre-show is running without walking around the whole building. The fact that every lighting fixture or audiovisual equipment is hooked to the same network is really great! I couldn’t live without it anymore. The combination of Medialon ShowControl, Richmond Sound Design, Kissbox interfaces and e:cue lighting control devices in one network is really working for us.”

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Rapenburg Plaza in Track with Richmond Sound Design

4th November 2005

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