Adlib shows warrior spirit in Liverpool
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Featuring 10 life-sized figures, the exhibition includes a terracotta cavalry horse from the burial site of China’s First Emperor Qin Shi Huang (221-206 BC) and over 25 smaller warriors from the Han Empire, China’s second imperial dynasty (206 BC - 220 AD). The exhibition opened in February and has already received worldwide acclaim and is exceptionally popular, attracting people from all over the UK and Europe, with visiting hours having been extended to accommodate the demand for tickets!
Adlib’s head of video, Tom Edwards, is project managing and oversaw the tender process for which they partnered with immersive technology experts and digital studio Draw & Code as content creators and presented to National Museums Liverpool (NML).
The brief was to make it immersive, experiential and fun and aim to engage a wider audience including those who might not necessarily consider visiting exhibitions.
“There wasn’t a specific existing technical brief in place,” explains Tom. “So we listened carefully to what they envisioned, and came up with some lively and flexible solutions for how to achieve the atmosphere, sonically and visually in the five separate areas, all distinctly different.”
Images are created with two Panasonic PT-RZ970 10,000 lumen laser projectors mapped across the wall. The technically challenging brief was to keep viewing space to a maximum, whilst achieving high brightness and resolution. A WATCHPAX 4 media server is serving up the content to the duo of mapped and blended projectors; and also controlling the Crown amplifiers plus the Osborne Technologies scent generator.
The audio installation comprises three Adlib AA61 speakers and AA12HL subs, run as a 3.1 surround system to give a rich 3D tone.
When the presentation finishes the doors open at the end of the room - also controlled via the media server and Visual Productions IOCore Artnet relay system - giving visitors their first glimpse of a terracotta horse and warrior before they pass into the second space, where they confront the Warring States.
Tom started work on the project back in August 2017 and the Adlib / Draw & Code installation team spent three months on site to make sure everything was tuned to perfection.
All the show scheduling is tied into a Dataton WATCHNET server, which provides advanced show control of the WATCHPAX media servers and is the command centre for all the IP-controlled devices in the system. Some of the network infrastructure is built around a fibre backbone to accommodate the distances between areas.
(Jim Evans)
