Telestron

Telestron involved a quite a few 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 the physical pieces, the VT Pro team pre-built the entire setup in LA at our studio. The reflecting pools were created as an elegant solution for keeping people away from the robots so 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 custom 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.