Dollywood!

I'm here in Asheville for Thanksgiving, and we went over on Friday to Pigeon Forge, Tennessee to see Dollywood.  I honestly thought Dollywood would be kind of cheesy, but given Ms. Parton's business acumen, I should have known better. Aside from some very heavy handed religious themes in some of the shows, Dollywood is a very well done theme park, and the shows that I saw all had excellent (albeit low budget) sound and lighting.  (Ample cheesiness can be found throughout Pigeon Forge and Galtinburg, however, see all my photos here).

 

LDI 2009--The Floor

On Sunday, we spent time finishing covering the floor, and I saw a couple cool things that I really liked.  (Note, this is Part III of my LDI coverage, Part II here). First was Total Fabrications' amazing RSC Lightlock, which previously debuted at PLASA.  The device allows you to hang a moving light on two cables, with the device actively counter-acting the rotational movement of the light itself.  This was very cool.  The units in the photo on the left do not have the device, while the units on the right do, and both are running the same movement program:

Here's a youtube video:

Googling on my return from LDI, it turns out that the RSC above stands for Royal Shakespeare Company, whose Head of Lighting, Vince Herbert, is the device's inventor.

TMB had a cool new product for control geeks--the ProShell, a little clamp that protects a RJ45 connector.

I haven't used these yet, but I want to check them out.  Let me know if you've got any experience with them.

After years of watching LED's infiltrate the floor, this seemed to be the year where there were products really finally integrating them to the point that we can start to see how they could fill all kinds of uses we hadn't imagined.  I saw a few moving lights that had a color temperature that would make them useful for illumination of people rather than just washing backdrops or columns in a special event hall.  On the larger end, at Showman Fabricator's Green pavillion I saw Strong's incredibly bright 600W collimated LED unit:

I also saw this pretty interesting projection film in the Chinese pavillion from Superimaging:

There was no one there to speak to us, but it looked pretty cool, and sort of similar to the Musion Eyeliner stuff.

I also stopped by ESTA's interoperability pavillion:

A special FX company was shooting bubbles over low fog, looks very cool:

Finally, in the lobby, we saw this:

We tried to get it to dispense some bills, but apparently it wasn't working.

LDI 2009--ICE! for Dinner

After the show control day (covered in part I here) was our annual show control dinner.  When we meet in Vegas, we typically go hiking in Red Rock Canyon (before his untimely death, my friend George Kindler would guide us on this hike), and then meet for dinner. Being in Orlando, we decided instead to see the ICE! show at the Gaylord Palms, which was fun.

Afterward, we had a nice dinner and caught part of the Gaylord's Christmas show:

More photos here, and more on the floor in Part III.

LDI 2009--Show Control Day

As I wrote this on the plane back from Orlando and LDI, I realized that I've been to every LDI conference  since 1990, which is kind of scary. And while I'm pretty sick of both Orlando and Vegas (between which LDI alternates), it's still worth it for me to go to these shows to see what's new, hang out with industry friends, and catch up with old and new connections. With the strangeness of the economy, the show felt a little weird, but there seemed to be plenty of people on the floor and most of the manufacturers I talked to seemed to be doing OK.

Thursday morning, I went to the ESTA Control Protocol Working Group meeting. I hadn't been to this meeting in a year (with Eddie Kramer, I co-represent Local 1 IATSE to the group), so it was good to see everyone and catch up, and also hear about the status of ACN from the people on the front lines. The show floor didn't open until Friday, so friends met me after the meeting, and we went on a nice hike of the Little Big Econ river where I just missed seeing a big alligator.  After BBQ for dinner, we went bowling (photos here).

Friday, we took a quick pass through the floor and then in the afternoon I moderated a panel called, "Beyond DMX, Peering Into the Crystal Ball" featuring Scott Fisher, Philip Nye, and Steve Terry, with us all discussing the future of lighting control.  This was a lot of fun, prognosticating on the future of lighting controls with a group of people whose predictions should be as good as anyone's. Our big message, of course: ACN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!  There were probably 30 or 40 people in the audience (which isn't bad since people have to pay for these sessions), and I heard afterward that people enjoyed this session, which is always gratifying.  I hope we can do a session like this again, although perhaps the meeting rooms could be a bit closer to the floor:

Saturday was "Show Control Day", which I co-presented with Jim Janninck. 

This was probably the 15th or so time I've done some sort of show control workshop at LDI, and I think we came up with a pretty good structure this year. I started off talking to 27 attendees about where modern show control is today, and where it's going, and then we threw a quick show control design challenge at the group--design a system to connect up Cirque du Soleil's Ka (article here on how Cirque solved this problem).  The attendees did really well on this project, and in the second part of the session, we teamed them up in small groups with volunteer experts: Alan Anderson, Scott Arnold, Dave Christoffers, Jason Pontius, and Stephane Villet all graciously volunteered their time to help the attendees.

 

After lunch, we moved onto the case study sessions, which is always fun for me, and we had some great presentations.  Scott and Jason of ShowSys started with a nice presentation on a system they built for the Force attraction at the US Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville, Alabama.

This looked cool and I'll definitely check it out if I get to...Alabama (one of the 10 or so states I haven't visited yet, so it's a possibility). 

Next up was Alan Anderson from Smart Monkeys talking about the amazing Comcast Experience in Philadelphia.  I've been to see this and have written it up here with lots of photos and videos; but Alan explained a bunch of the technical details I didn't know about, which was great.

After a break, Jason Goldenberg and another engineer (sorry, didn't get his name, maybe someone can fill me in?) from Fisher Technical (FTSI) talked about the incredible City of Dreams Bubble Theatre show down in Macau.

I guess I need to get down to Macau to see all the stuff going on down there--this show looks unbelievable.  

We closed out the day with Dave Christoffers talking about his show control system for an amazing automated high-definition video production at the American Idol Experience show. 

Back in June, Dave gave a nice backstage tour of this show to Jim (whose company, Timberspring, developed the voting system for the show) and me; writeup here.

Over the years, we have tried all different kinds of approaches to this show control session, from connecting up tons of hardware to simple talking head panels, but I think was was one of the best ones we've done yet, and I hope we continue to get to do this kind of thing in the future. 

It's also interesting to me how doing really incredibly high-tech shows these days is almost routine.  Thinking back to the mid-1990's, when a show like Buccaneer Bay (writeup with my photos here) literally bankrupted companies, it's great to see how far the industry has come.

More on my trip in Part II.

Weather Time Lapse From Space

I shoot a lot of time lapses of clouds, but I'm not able to shoot from this vantage point:

These are modeled clouds, at 7-km global resolution, from the GEOS-5 weather satelite system. 

I saw this first on Geeks are Sexy, and then found the above Youtube video posted a few days earlier, and then found the original, created by NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center's Science Visualization Studio--link here.

Another Time Lapse

Ooops, forgot to release this post!  Here in Orlando at LDI, my first session (DMX) is tomorrow.

Shot this Monday night.  Still working on getting a good compression setting, but this one's getting closer:

There's one meteor in there if you look closely...

Off to Orlando!

I'm off today to Orlando for LDI, where I'm doing two sessions. One is an all day Show Control Day with Jim Janninck; the other is a session on "Beyond DMX--Peering into the Crystal Ball" with Scott Fisher, Philip Nye, and Steve Terry. We usually have a hike and dinner at LDI, but where do you hike in Orlando?  So we're going to ICE! instead!  See you there!

Rock-AFire Explosion

I had seen some of these Rock-afire videos, with a pretty sophisticated animatronic setup performing modern indie songs, like Arcade Fire:

NIN:

MGMT:

I knew these systems were made back in the 80's by Aaron Fechter of Creative Engineering, Inc.  However, thanks to an email from James Hergen, I found out that there is now a documentary, called The Rock-afire Explosion:

The story of Rock-afire is crazy, with a long history involving Showbiz Pizza Palace (additional link here), and its battle with Chuck E. Cheese's.  Rather than summarize it, you should click those links and read the craziness for yourself.  I just ordered the DVD of the movie.

Toshiba's Very Cool "Space Chair"Ad

Toshiba info here, and "Making of" video here:

Clouds Over Brooklyn Time Lapse

I'm trying some new time lapse techniques, and shot this from my roof yesterday:

My little Nikon (P6000) has a built in time lapse mode, that takes photos and compresses them automatically. I made this time lapse by shooting lots of individual pictures with the P6000's built in intervalometer, and then used using HandyAVI and the Accusoft Picvideo Motion JPEG encoder to make them into a motion JPG movie.  I then let Vimeo compress it.  There's still a few glitches but overall I think it looks OK.  Now, if I can just get my Nikon D90 to behave--when I shoot with an intervalometer on that camera, I get some weird movement inside the frame.