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Harkness Hall Screens for New Crystal Cathedral Show
Electrosonic Systems Inc. (Electrosonic) rose to extraordinary heights to install the video and audio systems for the new California, USA Crystal Cathedral show ‘Creation: Once Upon All Time’, which features a 77.5 x 8.6m (252 x 28 foot) seamlessly integrated Harkness Hall screen system.
The Crystal Cathedral is the home base for the international Crystal Cathedral Ministries founded some 50 years ago by Dr. Robert H. Schuller. The Cathedral has a congregation of over 10,000 members and is known world-wide for the televised series, ‘Hour of Power’. Designed by celebrated architects Philip Johnson and John Burgee, the huge building has more than 10,000 windows of tempered, silver coloured glass held in place by a lace-like framework of white steel trusses.
The show, written, produced and directed by Carol Schuller Milner, takes place at night and blends elements of live theater, aerial acrobatics, puppetry, original music, and light, colour and sound effects and a complete two-hour computer-generated film with original digital content crafted by Santa Monica based Threshold Entertainment.
To display the computer generated content Electrosonic installed a 77.5 x 8.6m (252 x 28 foot) screen, the largest on the West Coast. “The screen is actually comprised of seven individual Harkness Hall screens,” explains Bryan Hinckley, Electrosonic’s systems sales engineer. “Each of the 3.8cm (1.5²) tubular steel wrapround frames is 11.08 x 8.6m (36 x 28 foot), three are rectangular and four are trapezoidal to enable the assembly to follow the architectural contours of the Cathedral. The surfaces are Harkness Hall Perlux 140 gain material for enhanced picture quality.
“The big challenge was the overall size of the screens hanging from the ceiling and connected together to create as seamless an image as possible,” notes Hinckley. “We accomplished this by flying the frames from a ceiling truss, clipping them together and tensioning them to the floor so they did not move although theyıre integrated into a very busy ceiling where aerial performers fly through the space.”
Projection is by seven Christie projectors on ‘anchored’ floating platforms also hanging from the ceiling of the Cathedral, all edge-blended to create a single image across all of the screens.
16th September 2005
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