“The Legend of Luna” extends Great Wolf Resorts’ storytelling canvas
Picture a cozy living room inside a log cabin on a chilly night. The fireplace is softly glowing, a dark-wood mantel is adorned with treasures from the forest, candles flicker in the windowsills, and you’re reading a fairytale aloud from a worn, leather-bound book. Now, take that scene and expand it to fit inside the Grand Lobby of North America’s largest indoor water park resort—and watch the fairytale play out before your eyes. “The Legend of Luna” at Great Wolf Resorts’ Perryville, MD, lodge is a new animated, nightly feature crafted with the magic of custom illumination, pixel mapping and a bespoke control system.
The immersive display tells the tale of a snow-white wolf pup finding the courage to be herself and sing her own song within her wolf pack; with the help of a design team compiled by BRC Imagination Arts, Luna’s dynamic story has been made modular and will soon be told in new Great Wolf locations in Connecticut, Florida and Texas.
“Light, in all its forms, is critical in taking the audience on the journey with Luna,” explained Emanuel Treeson, founder and principal of NYXdesign, a firm brought onto the project via its longstanding relationship with BRC Imagination Arts. “Our goal was to extend the canvas of our storytelling from the main screen to the entire Grand Lobby environment. For example, when Luna is a very young pup playing in the autumn leaves, the room is painted in tones of amber and yellows. When Luna is feeling alone and shunned, the room takes on cold tones of pale and dark blues, getting even darker when Luna feels most alone. The room expands with light and color when Luna saves the pack. Her magic takes its form not just on the main screen placed high on a fireplace façade, but across the walls, ceiling and floor of the lobby. With each enchanted howl, there are bursts of light in jewel colors of cyan and lavender. Light dances acrosst he central fireplace and the audience itself.”
To create the whimsical guest experience, as well as provide the necessary illumination for seasonal celebrations and daily activities like yoga sessions and family dance parties, designers needed a carefully coordinated lighting strategy. It begins with custom chandeliers and a fireplace façade that do more than meets the eye. Ten chandeliers, designed by Treeson in collaboration with BRC Imagination Arts and manufactured by Neatherlands-based firm 181, appear to be simple: hoops made of metal, each with 24 individual glass light shades. However, hidden within the traditional luminaires are complex technological layers.
Glass light sources around the hoops flicker as if real they were candles, due to individually DMX-addressable emitters in three separate colors (an ultra-warm amber, a warm 2700K and an ultra-cold 8000K) pixel mapped to evoke the visuals of organic flames. Linear Flex grazers, also by 181, hidden within the hoops of each chandelier illuminate the lobby’s ceiling with saturated colors. Furthermore, the false fireplace can shift in color due to additional Linear G36 grazers by 181 that are cut to custom lengths and hidden within the mantel.
Beyond the multi-purpose chandeliers, the team incorporated numerous architectural and theatrical lighting elements into the scheme. For example, sconces by 181, with individually controllable up and downlighting, add another layer of dynamic capability to the lobby; in using grazing fixtures from the same manufacturer, the team was able to ensure color matching across the space and produce more than just the nightly show. “We created a space that lives and breathes throughout year to delight and surprise lodge guests,” said Treeson. Additional architectural elements include RGBW Chroma-q Inspire XL fixtures in the high ceiling of the lobby and ETC Navis recessed downlights in low-ceiling spaces. The former fixture type provides unsuspecting white light during the day that transforms into a dynamic color-changing system at night, while the latter fixture type helps to create what appears to be a seamless, single wash of light that expands across various ceiling heights.
Theatrical lighting elements, and surprising use of the picture frame that displays Luna’s animated journey, also aid in setting the perfect immersive scene for guests. “The heart of the theatrical lighting system consists of the Ayrton Diablo and Mistral fixtures. These are compact, high-performance LED automated lights that provide consistent quality, color and brightness,” explained Treeson. “The Diablos and Mistrals are essentially the same fixture, with the main difference being that the Diablos come equipped with a full-field shutter system, allowing for more precise control over light shaping. We tucked [Diablos] away from the audience’s direct line of sight in the show’s lighting cove. The Mistrals, on the other hand, are recessed into ceiling cavities to accommodate the lower sightlines of the audience below. To blend these fixtures seamlessly into the environment, we employed custom RAL-colored covers that match the ceiling’s color, along with circular housings that concealed most of the fixtures.”
Then, placed within the 6-ft by 9-ft hero screen frame on the fireplace are robust LED bullets with PixLite Bright String from Advatek Lighting, which virtually disappear—until they light up at important moments during the fairytale. Finally, random patterns of light to emulate stars in the night sky are laser fired at the entire façade for an additional layer of experiential enchantment.
Two complex control systems by ETC, a SMPTE timecode and astronomical clock, ensure that the show goes on without a hitch. The display is so complex, Treeson noted, “We needed ETC to unlock the total number of control channels that the Eos [system] could control to allow for the sheer scale of the control needs of the show. The chandeliers alone require 18 DMX universes of control to function.”
While Eos operates the theatrical illumination, a Paradigm system controls architectural fixtures in the lobby, retail areas and the lodge’s restaurant. The SMPTE timecode aligns the animated video of Luna’s journey to all of the lighting, laser, sound and special effects to precise cues down to 1 ⁄30th of a second. Finally, the team implemented an astronomical clock to maximize the use of daylight, allowing for live adjustment of light levels, providing the nature-themed resort with a green thumbprint.
A Spark of Imagination
The dual-sided, 30-ft tall fireplace façade in the Grand Lobby not only displays Luna’s animation but also recreates the welcoming aesthetic found in the Grand Lodges of National Parks (large spaces that blend American and European design styles with themes of nature to form “parkitecture”). While key to the project’s success, the theatrical hearth produced one of the project’s most challenging design aspects: the illusion of flames.
“The faux fire’s flames are created with ultrasonically produced super-fine mist, lit from below,” explained Treeson. “Off-the-shelf mist units were retrofitted with custom RGBA LED boards from GLP and several Precision Projection Frame units to give the fire life. This approach allows the flames to take on [custom colors], matching story beats as the tale unfolds. To build out the fireplace and deepen the flame effect, we concealed an LED screen that sits behind the faux logs and a printed brick mesh that displays animated flames, smoke and embers. To round it all off, we used a multi-unit MDG fog system that drives the fireplace’s larger smoke effect. We found that by layering different sources and angles together, we could create a far more successful illusion.”
THE DESIGNERS |
- Emanuel Treeson, Member IES, is founder and principal lighting designer of NYXdesign.
- Kurt Schnabel is a system designer with Clearwing Systems Integration.
- Josh Selander is a lighting programmer.
- Nils Porrmann is a notch programmer with Dandelion & Burdock.
- Edward Hodge is BRC vice president of creative and innovation and acted as a project creative director.
- Matthew Solari is BRC Vice President of creative and story and acted as a project creative director.