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Lighting the Time Warner ‘Prow’
The LED panels are double-sided, in three different sizes: 2 x 8 feet, 6 x 6 feet and 4 x 12 feet. All are supported by a 121-foot vertical truss and the entire assembly weighs about 10 tons. Brian Webb designed the sculpture and David Rome of RomeAntics Productions was the producer, with Ted Mather acting as the lighting designer and Paul Sonnleitner programmer, working with a grandMA. The control systems were designed by Scharff Weisberg Lighting.
From 4pm to 11pm each evening, the panels are illuminated in a variety of patterns, which change color for three minutes and then hold a look for 30 seconds. This montage pauses every 15 minutes to indicate the current time, with the larger panels reflecting the hour and the smaller panels the minutes.
The sculpture was preprogrammed at Prelite New York and also supported by Prelite’s Rodd McLaughlin onsite, with the programming conducted from Trump Hotel using a wireless network to run the system remotely. This was considered by the team to be a technological triumph, since the system worked flawlessly – and continuously - in the heart of the broadcasting center of Manhattan.
The team also used a new function on the grandMA, which was initially designed to support the MA media server. Bit-mapped files can be imported and then attached to a user-defined grid. The team created a grid for each size panel, with each LED represented. By moving the imported image through the grid, the system can produce the appropriate output – in this case color – to match the image. This shortened the programming time significantly.
Ted Mather comments: “We couldn’t have done this project without Prelite. We did a full size mockup of one of the panels, so we knew what each panel would look like when the design was realized. Rodd was indispensable to us in helping determine the best way to use the bit-mapped files and create the grid systems. We got the basic design and timing down in the studio and then once we were onsite – which was for only three days – we ran the cues live for a limited time at night and the remainder of the time fine-tuned the design with visualization software.”
26th April 2005
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