Capilano Canyon Lights

Designing a themed projection mapping experience, built to withstand the elements.

Background

Capilano Suspension Bridge Park’s annual Canyon Lights Festival incorporates numerous displays meant to illuminate the surrounding canyon and rainforest.

For their winter 2019/2020 exhibit, I was tasked in designing an automated and weatherproof projection mapping system. The projection would illuminate the park’s Raptor Ridge exhibit with Go2’s, Spirit of the Rainforest short animated feature.

Client

Capilano Suspension Bridge Park

Studio

Go2 Productions

Panther
MakerLabs

Partners

A/V Systems Designer
A/V Technician
3D Modelling and Fabrication
Asset Management

Roles

Timeline

Design/Development - 2 Mo. (Oct - Nov 2019)
Installation/Testing - 1 Mo. (Dec 2019)

Location

Raptor’s Ridge

Unique Challenge

If you’ve lived in Vancouver through winter, you know it rains…a lot. Add the park’s location (Mount Cypress) amongst a dense rainforest, it quickly became apparent no ordinary A/V solution was possible for the installations winter runtime. This created an opportunity for a customized projection system that needed to withstand a cool, wet climate with limited sightlines.

Design

Going forward, our team looked at how to use the Raptor Ridge structure to our advantage:

Mounting a projector from an overhanging proscenium arch to keep the projection unobstructed.
Existing interior space that can serve as dry space for storing a media player and other electronics.
Existing beams for mounting a viewing surface to.

The projector needed to survive 3 months of rain, snow, and cold weather. I sketched out a simple box, large enough to fit a Panasonic PT-TW370 Ultra Short projector and an Arduino run air ventilation system.

This projector was supplied in a partnership agreement with Panasonic. Weatherproof projector housings are commercially available, however, due to how limited the sightlines were to the image surface, a custom design was required.

Teaming-up with MakerLabs, a projector housing was fabricated using waterproof acrylic. For ventilation, a temperature sensor was tested and developed, running 2 PC fans to remove hot projector exhaust.

Within the Raptor Ridge structure, an A/V control system running Resolume was housed with cable feeding out to the projector and audio equipment. The PC was setup to begin running content from Resolume, as well as turn on the projector, at 5pm with a shutdown at 9pm.