The Light Of A Child’s Smile

May 06, 2003

Ken Flower of Dreamscapes dcd pty ltd., an Australian based designer/creative director, recently completed a design for an interesting and unique environment at the Children’s Hospital at Westmead in NSW Australia.

The project was for the Starlight Children’s Foundation, an organization dedicated to helping sick kids, and involved a dynamic imaging and lighting design for the hospital’s Starlight Express Room. 

Starlight Express Room
Starlight Express Rooms are vibrant and interesting environments currently in five Childrens Hospitals throughout Australia – with two more planned. The rooms are designed to provide a magical and quite separate place for the children to escape the daily rigors of hospital life. They provide various daily activities – entertainment, movies, crafts, guest appearances, dance and computer games. The room also doubles as a TV studio with video, cameras, mixing and switching to all the wards in the hospital. There is also a radio station broadcasting music and requests.
 
Ken was invited onto the project following an introduction to Jeanne Rockey AM (Director of Hospital Services) and Jill Weekes (CEO) at the Starlight Foundation who were looking for a different approach to lighting and projection. Ken has a history in concepts and design for experiential environments and communication spaces - lighting, projection, imaging - and often uses Martin products in his designs.

Sum of parts is greater than individual components
All players involved wanted the various design elements integrated properly thus providing a good balance and equilibrium where the sum of the parts are greater than the individual components.
 
“I wanted the projection and imaging to be able to cover all surfaces of the room in different ways – walls, gauzes, floor and ceiling,” Ken states. “By using ‘shades of white’ as the base color scheme we were able to turn the whole room into a three dimensional projection surface. The whites and soft grays the architects came up with wouldn’t distort any of the color or imaging but could also stand alone as a sophisticated look in it’s own right.” Phillip Mathieson from Burley Katon Halliday designed the architecture and interiors with video and audio by Andrew Robertson of Shorty Productions. Drapes and gauzes were by Murray Smith of Sundrape Aust.
 
Moving wallpaper
“I came up with the idea of using moving lights to project friendly unobtrusive images as ‘moving wallpaper’. Shoals of tropical fishes, flocks of butterflies, families of kangaroos and passing clouds could become backgrounds to the various activities. With gentle movements and changing colors I wanted to create a visual language that could provide a quirky but calming influence. As a visual language in this environment it was important the color and imaging not overtake the room, the activities or the children. It had to be passive.”
 
To achieve this Ken settled on 6 Martin MAC 250+ profile projectors and 56 generic fixtures as overall color washlights. “The MAC 250+ were just great with their sharp optics, 250 MSD light source, indexable gobos, rotating prisms, soft color and smooth movements. They are also cute to look at. The generics recessed nicely into the ceiling and provided a good, even 4 color background wash with infinite variations.” Martin’s Australian distributor Show Technology supplied the Martin MAC 250+.
 
“Having calculated the magnification factor for the image sizes - I then designed the montages that became the gobos. I wanted to keep as much of the textures in the fish and butterflies, etc as I could so I went for glass gobos with different shades of gray-scale. Joakim Odlander at Gobotech was great helping with this and produced the finished gobos with fantastic resolution in double quick time.
 
LightJockey control
“For the control system I wanted to avoid a large control desk bristling with knobs and dials. The operators of the rooms are the ‘Capt. Starlights’ who mainly look after the children and the daily activities - as such they need easy, quick and non-technical access to the different states.
 
“I chose the Martin LightJockey software and LightJockey Touch via a PC and 17” touch screen to fill that side of the brief. It’s a good system that gave me the flexibility to program properly and accurately (if need be, by remote) – and with a simple user interface ideal for busy non-technical personnel.”
 
Having worked closely with the architects on suspension points and cabling, the installation was quite straightforward. Trevor Lloyd from CLS managed the installation with support from Vince Haddad at Show Technology.
 
“The room is running well with limitless opportunities for different imaging and programming in the future. We all hope the feedback from the children will help us with that process - and keep our feet firmly on the ground.”

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