After more than three years in the making, Sea World launched one of the most anticipated rides in the theme park’s history – The Leviathan, the centrepiece of the $50-million New Atlantis-themed area. This modern wooden rollercoaster is described by the theme park as an “impressive tower of timber taking guests on a thundering quest where they reach speeds of up to 80km/h, experiencing exhilarating turns, crossovers, drops and dips”.
However, Leviathan is not only garnering praise for the actual rollercoaster ride itself but also for the immersive experience that envelops those queuing for a ride in the underwater utopia.
Audiovisual installation specialists Run By Media spent two years planning the AV integration, over a year on-site building and countless long hours working closely with their design team Show Technology’s Clint Dulieu and Lighting Designer Toby Sewell to bring this next-level project to light.
“The whole of the entry caves and load station is beautifully themed and well installed so it was fairly easy to light,” remarked Toby Sewell. “Once you walk into the load station, there are screens on three sides of the room and the ceiling. It’s quite a complicated audiovisual setup synching audio, lights and the content on the screens. Consequently, it was a great, fun space to light.”
For general wash lighting of the space, 57 x Prolights DisplayCOB FC, a 60W compact full-colour COB PAR with a parabolic reflector, were chosen. Thirty were located in the load station with the rest distributed through the entrance and exit caves. Reinforcing the underwater theme, the colours employed are aquas and blues. Inground LED fixtures, in the form of 36 x Studio Due TERRA RGBW, are used to highlight the tunnels but are most effective when lighting up a couple of substantially sized, high-gloss columns in the load station, adding depth and texture around the room.
Upon departing and arriving back at the load station, the rollercoaster is enveloped in low fog courtesy of a couple of Look Solutions Cryo Fog.
With the height of the rollercoaster varying between 3 and 26 metres and the attaching of fixtures to the structure prohibited, lighting fixtures had to be located on the ground and consequently needed to pack a punch.
“We chose the ShowPRO Colour Ranger architectural lights,” explained Toby. “There are 85 x Colour Ranger 27 wash lights for the lower levels and 15 x Colour Ranger 48 for the higher levels. Again, it’s themed as an underwater experience so the colour palette is aquas and blues with 8 x Prolights Mosaico XL supplying watery textures with their shutters, animation wheels and gobos.”
At the heart of the lighting control system for the attraction was the MA Lighting grandMA3 onPC Rack Unit Controller.
“We believe this to be the first use of a grandMA3 system in a ride attraction, a market segment MA is not normally known for,” commented Clint Dulieu. “However, when discussing what they wanted with the project teams from Village Roadshow Theme Parks and Run By Media it was clear some of the overlapping and dynamic lighting effects they were after could only be properly achieved on a true theatrical-type control system.”
When it came time for programming, some of the new workflow tools in grandMA3 like Selection Grids and Cue Recipes made the process of achieving these dynamic looks easy. During the commissioning phase, the use of recipes made updating timing to match the ride extremely fast.
“We were able to re-jig the entire ride sequence timing quicker than the coaster was ready to run another cycle,” added Clint. “Something that would have taken far longer on a traditional timeline-based controller.
“We produced a custom plugin for Q-Sys which talks to the MA3 software to handle all control and triggering and we wrote custom Plugins for the MA3 to provide feedback and monitoring to Q-Sys on the full state of the system.”
Inputs via Q-Sys from the rides PLC control system provide triggers so that the coaster lighting can follow the path of the train as it completes its circuit.
Handling control and media playback for the highly immersive station environment are two AV Stumpfl Pixera media servers. A large amount of time was spent working with the content creators and story designers to ensure an immersive environment was created for the guests so there was a seamless transition out of looping content and into show sequences. The team from Show Technology and AV Stumpfl were instrumental in their support of the project. Pixera is delivering playback of eight simultaneous video files to the LED screens as well as handling around 32 channels of multitrack audio via Dante.
Run by Media configured the Q-Sys system to cue Pixera playback and markers in the timeline provide triggers back to Q-Sys which are used to synchronise the lighting with the Video and Audio effects.
