Professional Lighting & Production - Summer 2018 | Page 27

The translucent light columns at both ends
of the corridor were an early cornerstone for
the Pinetree Way project. “Coquitlam is very
wooded and known for its natural beauty,
but has been growing pretty quickly with the
SkyTrain and other major developments, so it
was about combining those two ideas in one
sculpture,” Bedard reinforces.
“The fabricator did a pretty spectacular
substructure of rigid steel armature, and it’s not
easy to get acrylic in that size [for the lit upper
portion] in a way that made this serviceable and
UV stable and all of that, so actually, there are
two access hatches at the bottom built into the
bark that can open up for electrical connections
to all of the LED strings.”
Color Kinetics’ iColor Flex LMX gen2s,
which are flexible strands of large, high-inten-
sity LED nodes with intelligent colour, deliver
the effect. The nodes are aligned in channels
and run up a structural frame wrapping the
central internal column that routes the leader
cable. Surrounding the nodes is a thin light-
reflecting screen, which itself is surrounded by
an outer layer of acrylic with light-altering film
applied to its interior.
“The big thing for this was maximizing the
impact by maximizing the pixel pitch, though
we didn’t want it to look like just round pixel
screens,” Bedard explains. “We didn’t want to see
the nodes or the individual pixels, so that diffu-
sive film was important to create that continu-
ous light spectrum within the column.”
Programming for the features was done
in Madrix 3D in order to realize the desired 3D
effect. “This was the first time we were working
with three-dimensional effects in virtual
lighting, as we wanted a way to create a base
colour with motion where we could still add a
sparkle that seemed to be on top of it, moving
through it,” Bedard explains. “We had a 3D patch
of the lights inside the columns, and were able
to get independent motion between the colour
wash and sparkle, so it was basically like having
two layers to manipulate, and the effect was
enhanced by the holographic film that adds a
whole new element.”
Bedard says the “aha” moment in fully realiz-
ing the effect they envisioned came when they
decided to pull some pixels out for contrast –
basically, adding black to bring more depth out
of the active nodes. “It started to look like it was
generating natural light, rather than just being
a pixel screen. You could see the pattern of the
pixels, but when we only had 60 or 70 per cent
of the nodes on in a kind of continuous slow
motion, it had more of a natural and ephemeral
look to it.”
The colours, movement, and intensity of
the lights are triggered by motion- and ob-
ject-tracking via a complement of IP cameras
and based on the type of transit that triggers
it, with different themes for pedestrians and
cyclists on the sidewalks, motor vehicles on
the roadway, the SkyTrain travelling along
the guideway, or a multi-modal feature for
multiple stimuli.
Eos Lightmedia’s Director of Design, Shaun
August, developed a custom software platform
that reads the camera input, defines control
parameters based on the desired stimuli, and
sends that information to the cue servers.
Pinetree Way guideway column lighting
Summer 2018 | 27