AC-ET helps bring Longleat’s Land of Light to life
- Details
The Land of Light was a journey through several different areas and featured a host of bespoke creations.
Longleat partnered with production and hire company, Zeal, who helped design and bring to life this experience.
Steve Hough, Zeal’s managing director comments: “We partnered with Longleat in May 2020 after they had to postpone their regular Festival of Light. The goal was to create a new unique experience from scratch that took consideration of coronavirus during the installation and the event itself. From there, we developed concepts and went on to design, build and produce an experience focused on stimulating the senses that allowed people to immerse themselves in real life, something that wasn’t possible throughout much of 2020.”
The 2km immersive journey featured an impressive 688 lights, 255 speakers, over 72,000 individually controlled pixels, scent machines, projection, a host of atmospheric and water effects, and even a 2,600sq.ft immersive laser room. All of which was synchronised together with more than 38,000m of cable and the latest in technology, bringing the magic of Longleat’s grounds to life as one.
A.C. Entertainment Technologies (AC-ET) was chosen to supply a number of products from leading brands including Dynamic Audio Device (D.A.D), Luminex, LumenRadio and Doughty, for this project.
Jonathan Walters, AC-ET’s sales director comments: “It was our pleasure to assist Zeal in finding the right solutions for this impressive project. A job of this scale requires reliable high-quality equipment to ensure each visitor experiences the wow factor. Our team of experts worked with Zeal to ensure they got exactly what they needed.”
When it came to the audio, Zeal wanted to avoid vast racks of amplifiers, and needed a significant number of high quality compact powered speakers to go throughout the experience.
After discussing their requirements with the Audio team at AC-ET, they chose D.A.D speakers as the audio solution, which they felt ticked all the boxes.
Luminex was the product of choice, and was responsible for the entire networking across the site, with five Gigacore 10s, two Gigacore 16 XTs and five Luminode 12s.
“We wanted an industry-proven product that could handle everything we needed even in challenging environments, and Luminex was the obvious choice. The Land of Light was a 2km outdoor journey, full of lighting, audio, video, lasers and special FX, and this was all linked together via Gigacore switches connected with over 2km of fibre. We created a fully redundant loop using the RLinkX technology, but it didn’t need to fall back on this once.
“We had seven network protocols sending to all areas of the site over separate VLANs. Configuring these through Araneo was simple, and any support we needed from Luminex was there in an instant.
“For DMX distribution we used Luminode 12s, which were reliable and great for any Artnet or sACN merges we had to do across the site,” comments Zeal’s Andy Jones, who oversaw and designed the networking system.
Zeal also used several of their Prolights products throughout the attraction, including StudioCobs and LumiPix which they had previously purchased from AC-ET for earlier projects.
Steve concludes: “Once again, we received prompt and personal service from the team at AC-ET who were on hand to offer support and guidance every step of the way. Given the timescales and turnaround of so many bespoke items, we were grateful for the quick and sometimes out of hours service to make sure we had everything we needed to complete the project.”
