Creating a
Winter Wonderland in Orlando for Cinderella’s Castle*
--by Bill Ferrara,
principal lighting designer, Walt Disney World
New to Disney’s
Magic Kingdom for Christmas 2007 were Castle Dream Lights. In a
show titled Cinderella’s Holiday Wish, Mickey, Minnie, Goofy,
Donald, Cinderella, and Prince Charming decide how to decorate
the Castle for the holiday season. With some help from the
Fairy Godmother, the Castle is transformed into a shimmering
spectacle of light. The display consists of more than 200,000
LEDs, 500 strobes, 15 miles of cable, and 32,000 square feet of
fishing net. The objective was to cover the Castle with
“magical ice.” Key buzzwords that drove the design intent were
“beautiful,” “graceful,” and, “elegant.”
To achieve this,
we used Blachere illumination’s cool white LED strings and
Barket Engineering’s programmable strobes, the combination of
which used barely enough power to run two standard
refrigerators. The lights are secured to the 3 inch netting,
which was tailored to fit over each section of the Castle for a
low profile, low impact method of attachment. Show director
Alan Bruun points out that, “One of the greatest challenges was
to make the lights virtually invisible during the daytime hours,
so that the Castle looks normal until the moment of
illumination. Nets and cables were all painted to blend into
the Castle colors, with the result that the impact to the
Castle’s daytime beauty is negligible.”
The LEDs are
grouped into 105 controlled circuits based on logical
architectural detailing. These circuits run back to control
boxes and not to dimmers. Inside the control boxes, each
circuit was assigned to one Randorn Switching Relay. Because it
takes so little power to light up an LED, each circuit depended
on an inline resistor to provide the necessary “ghost load” and
stop the small amount of trickle voltage from getting through.
Each control box has one DMX control card telling the relays
what to do. The strobe layer consists of 345 individually
programmable strobes and approximately 150 pre-existing random
flash strobes. Combined with the LEDs, the lights were
programmed in various effect routines to create a shimmering
look. The occasional random strobe flashes help add an icy
sparkle to that shimmer.
Bruun adds, “We
wanted to have a very fluid control of the lights, so that they
would ‘flow’ across the castle in any direction, supported by
banks of strobes that can be individually controlled. This
results in a very directional control, which maximizes the
impact of the Fairy Godmother’s magical illumination of the
Castle. As she points her wand in any direction, strobes and
lights appear to shoot out of her wand and cover the walls and
turrets. In the words of author Arthur C. Clarke, ‘Any
sufficiently developed technology is indistinguishable from
magic.’”
To program, we
built a simplified model of the Castle in Cast Software Wysiwyg,
layered in the new lighting and programmed our show with a
Flying Pig Systems Hog iPC console. The finished looks are a
combination of base color washes, provided by 34 ETC Irideon
wash fixtures and this overlay of LEDs and strobes. The plan
was simple, the task, enormous, but the end result is
breathtaking.
(*reprinted from
“Live Design” magazine, January 2008) |
|
Donate to themeparks.com to help defray the costs of running this
website. |
