Telestron

Day For Night 2017 - VT Pro Design

Originally created for Day For Night Festival 2017, Telestron was an exploration of the absence and presence of light and how it defines a space. Our team wanted to play with a dramatic scale, and to do so we employed two Robotic Conductors, wielding large, fabricated geometric shapes to manipulate the various light sources and cast brilliant arrays of graphic shadow work throughout the space. 

BTS

Starting from the ground up, Telestron involved a handful of different aspects - VT Pro’s design, previz, fabrication and physical production, electronics, show control systems, the two Robots and their risers, and then the timeline programming of the show. 

For all of the physical pieces, the VT Pro team pre-built the entire setup in LA at our studio. The reflecting pools were the more elegant solution for keeping people away from the robots and custom pool liners and frames were made to support them. The robots themselves were sitting on weighted pedestals that were then bolted directly to the concrete on-site. 

Attached to the robots were the icosahedron shapes that we engineered and designed in-house. The frames themselves were built with channels on the interior that let us sink LED Pixel tape throughout the geometry. We then covered that pixel tape with frosted gray diffuser frames. In each vertex we also placed and extremely bright LED Cob which was wired to individual dimming controls. Finally we mounted a Robe Megapointe moving light to the interior of the shape, giving us a focusable and movable light source inside the shape to get our natural texture through its faces.

For programming, we animated all of the robots moves in 3D software, refining their motion over and over again until satisfied. We then rendered volumetric lighting previs to see how the lights emanating from the object would cast throughout the space, using this knowledge to refine the animations even further. From there our team built a master control system in Touch Designer that triggered the robots, controlled the LED Pixel Tape, and sent out a master timecode clock that was read by the lighting console as well, which we used to program the two moving lights, and the room lighting as well.

RENDERS

CREDITS
 

Production Design: VT Pro Design
Creative Direction: Michael Fullman, Bradley G Munkowitz
Concept Writer: Stephen Marshall
Touch Designer Programming: Matt Wachter
Lighting Design: Gabe Fraboni
Technical Design: Harry Souders, Jack Gilmore
Production Management: Hayk Khanjian, Nico Yernazian
Lead Robot Animation/Concept Designer/Previs Animation: Jordan Ariel
Additional Robot Animation: Akiko Yamashita
Design Assistant: David Gao
Cinematographers: Andrew Curtis, Aaron Marcellino
Editor: Jordan Ariel
Colorist: Billy Hobson
Composer: SoundsRED