Kia “Light Up the Holidays” TECH NOTES

Posted by :Matt Ardine On : September 15, 2007

Director: Damian Kulash
Producer: Kelli Abraham
Lighting Designer: Matt Ardine
Production Designer: Brian Branstetter
Cinematographer: Chris Soos

Programmers: Michelle Sarrat, Cat West, Matt Ardine
Gaffer: Danny Golzalez
Data Tech: Paul Sartain
LED Tech: Dustin Gardner
Car Light Tech: Mike Beckman

Lighting Equipment provided by:

Volt Lites
RGB Lights, Chicago
Controllable Lighting Solutions
Litegear
Cinelease

A Kia dealership is transformed into a large scale lighting display set to “CHRISTMAS EVE IN SARAJEVO” BY THE TRANS SIBERIAN ORCHESTRA. We see the headlights of the cars light up. Behind the cars, the dealership, and the lot, also being to come to life with lights. Suddenly, we interrupt into a rocking visual of holiday lights.

Equipment

Lights

280 – Color Kinetics iColor Flex LMX
31 – Color Kinetics PDS-60 PSU
14 – Clay Paky Mythos
10 – Arri Skypanel S-60
28 – SGM P1
60 – Pixel Strands, 50 per strands
8 – Sparkulators
28 – Litegear 6×6 12v Dimmers and PSU’s
7 – RGB Geysers

Control

2 – GrandMA2 Full
1 – GrandMA2 Command Wing
1 – GrandMA2 3D Computer
4 – PRG Mbox Studio V4
6 – GrandMA2 NPU
4 – TMB Proplex EZLan Switches
4 – 24 port Netgear Unmanaged Switches
1 – WDMX 2 Universe Transmitter
2 – Innovative Dimmers PDB10
4 – Optisplitters
1 – Leprecon 6 channel dimmer w/ WDMX

We did previz in GrandMA2 3D at the Volt Lites Previz suites. We created 2 versions of the :30 commercial and one version of a :72. The previz videos are below. I used 2 MBOX’s to pixel map the lights on the walls and the bushes then sent that data into GrandMA2 to do a HTP merge so that we can visualize on the model of the building that I created in Vectorworks. Matt Ardine programmed the first :30, Cat West programmed the second :30 and Michelle Sarrat pulled a 27 hour programming session to pull off the massive :72.

MBOX is unique in that it can send Kinet2 straight out of it. Using this simple protocol, instead of sACN, it made addressing and setting up much faster in prep. With Kinet2, you only need an IP address and a port number instead of IP address, Universe, DMX address, and port number. This allowed Paul Sartain to create easy to read charts and plots with simplified numbers on them for the install. After the prep and the previz, the install took 3 days on site lead by Gaffer, Danny Gonzalez. Mike Beckman did tests early on with the Litegear 6×6 dimmers to check if we can use them to control the headlights, directionals, and daytime running lights through DMX control. We realized that they pull a total of 30 amps and that we would need large power supplies to accomplish the 84 channels of dimmers required for the whole row of cars.

During the first and second day of the install, Michelle Sarrat, was still in previz, hammering away on the :72. It has thousands of cues in the timecode file. In the previz suite, we had a GrandMA2 full, 2 MBOX’s and a GrandMA2 3D computer. On the location, we had a duplicate system plus a command wing and 6 NPU’s to unlock parameters and distribute DMX.

There were a total of 65,000 DMX channels that had to be pushed over the network. One MBOX had the 2 main pixel maps. One map was for the perimeters of the building and the other was for the insides of the walls. Both of these output sACN during previz and Kinet2 on site. The second MBOX had a map of the hedge that sent out sACN to the Holiday Couro controllers. The second MBOX was also used to convert sACN to Kinet2 to get data to the strands on the pillars, since the MA2 FX engine would be much easier than pixel mapping for the spirals. The MA2 output sACN directly to the trees, bushes, snowflakes, and wreath. We used MANet2 and NPU’s to get DMX to all the other non-pixel lights and FX units. We opted to keep the MANet2 and the sACN separate from the Kinet2 traffic. To do so, each MBOX had 2 network cards. One for the control from GrandMA2 via sACN, and one to output to Kinet2. We used the TMB Proplex EZLan switches to allow us to create a VLAN for each but have the capability to only run 1 trunk lines for the various segments.