"Talking" Waterfall

[delicolor]

I had a visit to Bradford Alhambra yesterday where it is in the final throes of their Panto.

 

The Production Manager from QDOS pointed out the waterfall effect and the flight case-based tanks for catching the cascade. I didn't really think anything of that, having seen what Disney (& Stageworks) can do with water. Then someone asked "How do you make it talk?" and it turns out that it can spell out words by an elaborate arrangement of solenoids. I'd not heard of that before, but it is obvious with hindsight!

 

We didn't see it in action, but presumably the words fall down the cascade at the speed of gravity.

 

I have no idea how large the "pixels" are, but at a rough guess it is maybe 4-6" width over about 20' or so.

 

I imagine it is from thetwinsfx.com as the illusions & show dragon apparently came from them.

[madorangepanda]

Have a search for Bit.fall

[Peter F]

The waterfall is very good. You don't really have pixels, the letters are made by leaving gaps in the flow of water. You have to pay attention to get some of the words because they go by quite quickly, physics dictates that has to be the case.

 

The show dragon is astonishingly good. Scared my 5 year old daughter absolutely witless, thank goodness we were sat in the Dress Circle. I think if we'd been in the stalls she would still be having sleepless nights. Everyone else loved it, just made them jump a bit, we've got a problem with dragons in our house, typical that a bloody great big one should turn up!

 

Excellent show, having been to a quite frankly amateur affair in my more local theatre the year before, it was fantastic to be able to sit and enjoy 2 hours of performance well delivered both by actors and technical crew.

 

Cheers,

 

Peter

[delicolor]

The bit.fall is interesting. I was visualising the enchanted waterfall effect the other way round and indeed that is how Peter describes it. (I put pixels in quotes because I was grasping for a word to define the horizontal resolution). I think the Twins contraption may have had fish plate nozzles to get the flat plane waterfall but it was hard to see it up in the Flys.

Excellent show, having been to a quite frankly amateur affair in my more local theatre the year before, it was fantastic to be able to sit and enjoy 2 hours of performance well delivered both by actors and technical crew.

We get a bit fed up with the formulaic big panto shows (& we can take or leave Billy Pearce anyway) so in recent years have constrained ourselves to the small scale no-stars traditional show at Wakey. However, we have heard good reports of the Varieties one and this one (& Wakey is perhaps getting a bit samey as well).

 

The show reset was surprisingly lengthly and the high levels of pyro and confetti take their toll on all of the movers which apparently need a lot more attention than usual. I didn't actually notice a "lampy hospital" though.

 

When we finished up the visit more than an hour after the show came down, they crew had gone but all the movers were parked full open white. (& from the gallery, I could see that one of them had a swirly source).

 

I have always been impressed that the Alhambra keep on top of the auditorium relamping but noticed that one of their house light 23's was off. (They have a pair of 23s and a pair of 123s on the upper circle front bar (painted cream), lighting up the friezes above the prosc and boxes).

 

Harder to spot were two missing lamps and shades from the numerous dome fittings, skillfully positioned to be symmetrical and unobtrusive.

[matt-hayes]

Having put the waterfall in, it's actually the LeMaitre owned AquaVisuall system with the LeMaitre linky here!

 

In terms of actual operation, in Bradford, it's a 24ft wide "screen" and there are a grand total of 720 solenoids used to create the text that gets dropped, which gives, for want of better words, a pixel pitch of about 1 cm.

 

Any other questions, and I can try and help!

 

Cheers

[delicolor]

Having put the waterfall in, it's actually the LeMaitre owned AquaVisuall system with the LeMaitre linky here!

 

In terms of actual operation, in Bradford, it's a 24ft wide "screen" and there are a grand total of 720 solenoids used to create the text that gets dropped, which gives, for want of better words, a pixel pitch of about 1 cm.

 

Any other questions, and I can try and help!

 

Cheers

Wow, that is impressive. The QDOS guy said that in theory it could be used for real-time words but it was a bit of a faff so it was just scripted in the Panto to reply to what the turns said. (Presumably with a cue trigger rather than just a fully timed routine).

[matt-hayes]

Theory is a good word to use there! Just about possible, but much easier to script in advance, and yes all on individual cue stacks for each "set" of words.

 

It really comes into it's own when you throw suitably designed images at it and get things like lines weaving across each other and images, I think there's an old car ad video somewhere that it was used on which looks quite good!

 

Cheers

Wow, that is impressive. The QDOS guy said that in theory it could be used for real-time words but it was a bit of a faff so it was just scripted in the Panto to reply to what the turns said. (Presumably with a cue trigger rather than just a fully timed routine).

[mark_s]

How is it controlled? As in, what do you feed it to get words/video out?

[mac.calder]

Hyundai used it for their i45 commercial in Australia

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tenxbN7qW7M&feature=player_embedded

[Ashley R]

Hyundai used it for their i45 commercial in Australia

 

When I first saw that ad a while back on the TV, I could swear it was done on a computer it just looked that unbelievable.

[matt-hayes]

All controlled via custom PC software and programmed using a set of image files, so anything that can be viewed as a black and white image can be dropped!

 

How is it controlled? As in, what do you feed it to get words/video out?

[Wuddy]

So presumably then, it's like a giant mono-chrome ink-jet printer but instead of a print head flying back & forth it has the required number of individual jets across its width.

 

It should therefore be feasible to feed coloured water (cyan, magenta, yellow) & clear to the jets via four solenoids and drop coloured images?

 

In fact, thinking about it you should be able to do the reverse of the water droplets by using air/CO2 via valves in a water tank and have the images going uphill like the headkeeper in a larger glass.

 

Or even bubble-jet with helium feed in free air, although draughts might be a problem in that case.

[pyromonkey]

Normally you would just light the water the colour(s) required.

 

Have a chat with Mark Turner at Aqua Graphics

His systems have a much better control surface & cabling then other systems mentioned on here.

 

 

Hope that helps

 

 

Dan

[ImagineerTom]

The "colour" comes from light reflecting off the droplets, not the colour of the droplets themselves. It would be virtually impossible to colour water sufficiently that it would show up over the natural tendency of droplets to reflect "white" light.

 

 

 

 

This technology has been around for a while - I worked on a show 4 years ago where the screen was synchronised with video projector (think about it) to create colour images and add an extra texture to the animation.

 

Gas's rising (in air or water) wouldn't work - there's a host of turbulence issues that mean they would never travel as straight as a raindrop falling down would.

 

 

[paulears]

Even if light did get coloured during reflection - you'd have a bigger problem. The dye would stain, and how would you separate it in the collection tank to recycle?