Quattrocanalis breathe life into Dinosaurs In The Wild
- Details
Created by the award-winning producers behind the BBC series and arena show Walking With Dinosaurs, the Dinosaurs In The Wild production (read a detailed report in LSi September 2017) uses the latest in AV and animatronic technology to generate a realistic, interactive walk-through back to the Late Cretaceous period.
Central to the successful creation of TimeBase 67 (built by Chronotex Enterprises) is the sound and lighting design along with the animatronics and the latest in 3D AV technology. The accent is on authenticity and accuracy.
There are three elements to this mix of theatre, theme park and the latest scientific research: the infrastructure and set design; the technical sound, lighting and AV content and the live action actors who inhabit the set and guide the visiting time travellers.
Sound has been entrusted to Remarkable Projects, the newly-formed partnership between leading West End theatre designer, Bobby Aitken and Scott Willsallen, who has been responsible for many major Olympic Games and other landmark opening and closing ceremonies. The company was also closely involved in the Pink Floyd exhibition: Their Mortal Remains.
The idea of forming a partnership fomented after Aitken and Willsallen had worked together on the London 2012 Olympic Games Ceremonies, where their respective skill-sets complemented each other perfectly. While Willsallen maintains his Sydney based technology consultancy, Auditoria, a technology consultancy for fixed installations, Remarkable Projects is a sound design consultancy for events and exhibitions.
There are two sections of the experience where video animations are the focus, a 4-minute animation and an 8-minute animation in a 3D arrangement of four displays. Remarkable Projects’ job was to create all sound for these animation in a 3D environment, again to make them as believable as possible. Additionally, they had to protect the audience from sound leakage from the other parts of the experience. “We used a crude version of noise-masking to not only reinforce the believability with atmospheric sounds, but also increase the background noise floor to help with some masking.” Thus sound spill was entirely eliminated.
While the Audac loudspeakers were chosen based on best quality for price, Willsallen set the bar incredibly high when it came to amplifier choice. “When I started considering the options I was searching for the impossible. Key factors were reliability, onboard DSP, remote control and monitoring over Ethernet, Dante, low impedance and 100V operation switchable per channel, around 200 to 400W per channel, line monitoring and low-cost per channel given our requirement of over 140 channels.
“I considered every amplifier brand that I knew to be reliable,” he continued. “I started looking at the Ottocanali range which offers great value per channel, before learning of the soon-to-be-released Quattrocanali series by a colleague from Powersoft’s Australian distributor, PAVT. The 1204 DSP+D was perfect in every regard and in a 4-channel unit, divided between the audio node racks with fewer unused channels.” Since sustainability and energy efficiency is a top priority for all their projects, Quattrocanali offers that aplenty.”
More than 200 Audac speakers are powered by 35 Quattrocanali 1204 DSP+D amplifiers.
After the show closed at Birmingham’s NEC, it stopped at Eventcity in Manchester for three months and will next hit London’s Greenwich Peninsula from 12 February until the end of July 2018.
(Jim Evans)
