Niagara Falls Illumination - The Story of lighting Niagara Falls

the illumination of the Falls has a really interesting first story the story goes an individual is driving over one of the bridges across the gorge in this giant lightning storm they see the Falls illuminated beautifully under the flashes of light and they think to themselves why can't we illuminate it like this every night why is only an ax lightning storm that we get to see the Falls and all its beauty in the evening I think it was this thought and the resulting push to illuminate the largest I've ever illuminated at the time is really the birth pace of light in design [Music] it was interesting taking a step back and looking at the history of the Falls and understanding that in the early 1900s you had lighting developed into a spectacle instead of lighting for the task lighting became this this firework that could be controlled in 1907 this gentleman named Walter Darcy basically for 30 days had 44 searchlights positioned onto the falls took these searchlights and arc lighting to a whole new level where he started lighting up all these architectural features that would otherwise be completely lost in the night and brought them to life for people to actually see and marvel at materiality that was otherwise laws hi I'm lioness Mottola and I'm the lighting consultant for the night falls illumination board I work for CTV television for most of my career as a lighting technician a lighting director the history of lighting of the Falls has come a long way from the gentleman who back in the very early days first observed the Falls in one night in an electrical storm and the illumination started back in the early 1800s with a variety of various sources of light shall we say lighting has the ability to change and morph the form of something change the color of something apply a gradient to something that otherwise would be will be flatted and white right off the start of this project we knew that we were going to be part of something very special something that was going to last a long time and be viewed by millions of people across the world this is a legacy project for everybody involved as a team we wanted to get it right so we tested everything I think throughout the process of the project we learned that the Falls means so much to so many people that locals think of the Falls in a certain way source of income it's the source of their livelihood I think that is what everything in life or everything we light as lighting design is whether it's bridges or buildings we deal with that as designers we deal with this idea that structures and objects mean different things to different people and one of the cool things about light is that letting connects people to those objects and we talked about this Lots when we do design presentations for clients we say lighting connects as an example if an object or structure is blue and blue someone's favorite color it connects them to it when someone has breast cancer and an object or structure turns pink in honor of breast cancer it connects them to that object devising a plan coming up with solutions for all the little issues that a unique project application like this needs and has never been done before the best response that I've been able to come up with is it's not an individual person that comes up with a solution but the team effort of presenting issues and then collaboration between each of the individual team players using the best of all the thought patterns this journey began for us in October of 2014 when the illumination board issued an RFQ to many companies around the world to see if there was a solution to their problem the team we assembled comprised of Salix multi banana lighting echo electric scene works and stanley products so we researched and located manufacture with groundbreaking LED optics 2° very tight beam and we also paired it up with a LED driver that would maximize the performance we use 1400 of these modules on the project Stanley worked with us to continue to improve their product even after we rewarded the project we looked for different sources of LEDs to put into their module tighten the beam in order to get the maximum performance out of it they were able to do that with us and still meet the delivery dates that were required RFQ called for three times the amount of white light so we determined as a team that we could do it with 72 of these Stanley fixture these Stanley modules Paul and I found a marina in Ennis ville that had a throw from one dock to another it was 2,000 75 feet so Paul stood on one end of the lake and I stood on the other end of the lake and I Shawn the light across the lake and he stood on the other side with a reflective vest and he would take a light reading RGB if you put him on make makes up white so we had a calculation that determined how many of those true white LEDs could then be made up of the three colors to pass this mock-up test we found an abandoned runway in Niagara region and we put that we put the mock-up fixture on one end of the runway and we measured 2,100 feet to the other end and Nick and myself were at the other end with light meters well echo and seen work we're at the other side with the team and we turned this thing on and it lit up the farm that was like a kilometer behind us this thing was massive Ed's team developed a mounting frame for the mock-up fixture and we we showed up on-site the day of the mock-up as a baseball fan it was kind of ironic because it was the game 5 of the bat flip game we were watching the Blue Jay game while we were wiring up the fixture on on a knife on an iPhone we turned on our fixture and you knew right away that there was there was no way that we were going to fail this my thought at the mind one at the moment was yes you're going to fire one of those modules and line up across then I thought it isn't going to make it across there well I had to eat those words because when they turn the module on there was no doubt at that moment that we we were going to experience something that night that we had never seen on Niagara Falls and in fact we did it lit up the island it because there was a there was a man standing on the american side of the falls on a on a laneway or a viewing deck and he had a like meter the readings they got on that night from our fixture was was 14 foot candles so we had more than doubled the amount of light we needed to we went through a really long process of trying to convince the Falls and convinced stakeholders that color changing and the dynamic ability the false has was an important thing to keep to illustrate this we ended up proposing a lighting concept of a sunset everyone got this idea that a sunset it's a natural effect it's a natural wonder of the world it was easy for them to explain to other stakeholders why the color changing was important for us as lighting designers it was an easy way for us to push the design ahead as well because the sunset required gradients which mean we now had to move away from this idea of just retrofitting the fixtures and back into 21 zones which they currently had into what is now like 350 channels of control the sunset drove how we did the color mixing to achieve the effect the sunset drove how we mapped out the channels in the Falls it drove major modifications in the bracketry and the design of the fixture mounting methods to allow for a gradient to allow for a bottom zone a middle zone a top zone you know and we work together to get to a final result that that I think everybody wants the public wants the illumination board wants my name Michael Smolinski I am a professional engineer and my position in a cell like this application manager very interesting project for me which combined many years of experience and knowledge I realize that these luminaries could be the best because I have good information about what we have in alighted in this the 150s she goes in the Agra falls specially Canadian sight was very different than we see now there is modern hundred AGI lay out had been created and calculated modern hundred the in the beginning was impossible that returns us to our possible solution what what we have now what we could propose and since me it's become to success so the challenge of this project is that we had to build the US side of the falls and the Canaan side of the falls in an AGI program so of course there are no dimensions so we had to take all the dimensions from Google Maps and build the falls and AGI and the second challenge was to try to duplicate what was existing at the Falls which is difficult because the existing rovol - searchlights did not have IES files so that required us to do some photometric calculations and take readings at the Falls of what was existing and try to put into the program to duplicate the original control structure was a copper backbone cable that was run which had a directional bore from the upper escarpment down here into the canyon and what we found is that that had to be redone because that infrastructure was decaying the communication protocol DMX that comes down here is done through a fiber optic link that is linking the three individual sites of this project which is Table Rock facility the tower facility illumination tower and then the illumination bunker down here in the canyon the control starts off in the tower with two rackmount strand Phillips Neos which are a computerized lighting console due to the distance to the table rock and do the distance to down here we had to go fiber at that point in time we've got to medium to vo5 switches which take fiber in and push a network from the network we then go into opto splitters which then push out dmx to the data racks each data rack has a bot row which gives us four separate dmx outputs which then go into the rocks the racks themselves the first driver takes dmx in and then broadcasts it through the next sixteen each driver controls the one DMX channel each driver controls one of the nine cell LED fixtures that you see but but we had such a good team dynamic going letting other people give input kept everyone engaged in the project I think keeping the conversation open throughout the process and managing that managing everyone's emotions and making sure everyone feels involved allows for that [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Mulvey & Banani Lighting

Views: 29,589

Keywords: Mulvey and Banani, Salex, Scenework, Ecco Electric, Niagara Falls, Illumination, Niagara Falls Lighting, Diccumentary, Short Films, Paul Boken, Alan McIntosh, MBL, documentary, Niagara Falls documentary

Id: IcWbpJOVArw

Length: 15min 25sec (925 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 23 2016