VALENCIA, SPAIN. – Equipson’s WORK PRO LS-Node RDM/DMX streaming device played a key role in ensuring the success of URA: A Celebration of Water, a multimedia experience installed along a one kilometer stretch of coastline in Québec, Canada.
More details from Equipson (www.equipson.es):
Designed by Cadabra, the creative division of audiovisual integration company XYZ Cultural Technology, URA is open throughout the summer and operates in both daylight and evening hours in Chandler, a place where the sea is both symbolically and economically important.
URA visitors are transported into a timeless maritime universe where they experience storms, shipwrecks, equinox high tides and even life at the bottom of the ocean with a chance to meet a host of sea creatures including a black whale. Guided by the voice of Lamia, a fantastical being descended from Basque legend, visitors spend an hour walking through eight storytelling stations where they are entertained and educated by a combination of vivid scenery and cutting edge technology.
Cadabra and XYZ worked closely with Equipson’s Canadian distributor AVL Media Group to identify the right audio, video and lighting technology for this project. For seamless management of the installation’s lighting, AVL recommended WORK PRO LS-Node2 DMX streamers, one of which was positioned at each of the eight stations.
“LS-Node2 brings DMX to between four and 10 different spotlights at each location,” says Garou Blancan, Cadabra’s lighting designer for URA. “Each station also has a video projector for video mapping and a number of loudspeakers positioned around the room to deliver the audio experience. Audio and video playback are carried out through a BrightSign Media Player and lighting playback is carried out through one main control console that talks to all the LS-Node 2 units across the site.”
WORK PRO LS-Node supports industry standards ArtNet and sACN and comes in three different models – LS-Node1, LS-Node2 and LS-Node4, with each number representing the amount of freely configurable DMX universes that model can handle. They all feature several modes of use including Standard Node, with ArtNet/sACN inputs and DMX outputs, and Merger, where the LS-Node can receive different universes via ArtNet/sACN and merge them in the same DMX output.
Blancan says that the LS-Node2 units were chosen for their ease of use, their support of PoE power and their small, rugged build.
“The price/quality ratio was also interesting,” Blancan adds, “and I have rarely seen a user interface that is so simple to program. We had multiple challenges to overcome on this project, not least the fact that the experience is located outdoors on a beach so everything – even the equipment inside the stations – had to be hard wearing and weatherproofed. Also, installing fibre optic communication was complex and we had some lighting programming issues to overcome to ensure that something happening in one station didn’t trigger an event in a different one. Having one control system across all eight stations certainly helped with this.”
Throughout the installation, AVL Media Group’s Maxime Perreault worked closely with the XYZ and cadabra teams, providing on-site support for the products, especially when there were short time constraints.
“The project was a great success and attracted many visitors over the summer,” Perreault says. “URA is now closed for the winter and will reopen in Spring 2020.”
