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leave the Great Hall to their departure gates. The Portals feature visual effects and sound effects that continually change to reflect the departing flights and the movement of passengers as they walk by. The Portals, with content evoking mosaic tiles, watery reflections, to- tem-like pillars and stringed instruments, suggest transformation and the movement and wonder of travel. The content themes are inspired by LAX destinations such as Tokyo, Paris and Sydney. Marcela worked closely with Miami-based consultant Smart Monkeys on the technical design and Montreal-based Moment Factory on the creative content of the installation, as she explained to mondo*dr: “Smart Monkeys was selected as the designer and consultant for the show control system given its ground breaking work in complex show controls,” said Marcela. “Moment Factory was selected as the prima- ry content producer given its diverse capabilities in multiple forms of content and unique experience in developing environmental content.” Digital Kitchen of Los Angeles was also brought on-board to develop brand related content given its experience in providing environmental media for corporate brand expression and Electrosonic, also based in Los Angeles, was appointed as the systems integrator given its experience in large-scale facilities.
“There were many challenges relating to this project as the airport was already under construction,” said Marcela. “Architecturally inte- grating the media features into an existing design, but in a seamless way that complemented the intention of the terminal architect was difficult. Adapting the features into the existing structural and me- chanical systems required designing frameworks that could mediate between the facility and the features.”
Marcela and her team were also tasked with the challenge of chang- ing the lighting system in the terminal from HID lighting to LED inor- der to allow for programmable illumination that worked in conjunction with the LEDs.
Commenting on the installation, Smart Monkeys’ Stephan Villet told mondo*dr: “As soon as Marcela got in touch we were deeply involved in all aspects of the project. LAWA wanted the project to be like nothing else available but it had to be able to make money - they knew they wanted the installation to feature big screens but they didn’t want low resolution content flashing all over the place like you get in Times Square, New York. We supervised the whole installation and everything that was close to the technical side of the project, engaging in all discussions with the IT department at the airport, the content producers and LED wall manufacturers. Everything had to be high definition and for an installation of this size, this brought a number of challenges. “We had long discussions with the airport about the installation con-
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tent - due to the size and quality of the displays you don’t want very fast moving animation going on - it’s hard to sustain on screens of such size, so we made sure that everyone understood that the con- tent had to be a window to a story rather than the whole thing. From a technical standpoint, we also had to consider that screens of this size and nature can’t just be driven through standard digital signage software - even though on the operation side this installation is very close to commercial digital signage systems - the need for schedul- ing and distribution is really what you find in this kind of product. “The brains of the system - controlling all of the equipment, the scheduling, and monitoring all the running features uses technology you wouldn’t usually find in the AV industry.” Moment Factory’s X-Agora software powers interactivity and generates dynamic real-time multimedia effects across the seven installations, all of which are made up of LED screens. Eight X-Agora dynamic video servers and 20 X-Agora video players run the inter- active components of the IEMS, along with seven Grass Valley K2 Summit four-channel static video players; two Grass Valley K2 Sum- mit static video media servers; 20 Spinetix HMP200 digital signage video players and five Vista Spyder X20 video units for processing. The total output of the IEMS is more than 105 million pixels - eight times an Imax theatre - equivalent to 19,075 sq ft of video, enough to cover the length of the 81-storey Eiffel Tower with a six-metre wide display.
Production techniques for the content included documentary filming, time lapse, ultra-high-speed filming in laboratory-like conditions, live action shoots with actors and elaborate sets, on-location filming, pure 3D productions, 3D composited with live action, interactive real-time 3D video effects, and more. All control is taken care of by Media- lon’s Manager Pro V6 show control software; Dell PowerEdge R710 virtualisation cluster hardware servers; and Dell PowerVault MD3220i operational data and offline media storage, while networking is han- dled by Cisco and Moxa.
Renkus-Heinz loudspeakers are part of the paging system used in the Villaraigosa Pavillion - 12 in total, while a Renkus-Heinz IC16- R-II loudspeaker is used for the Welcome Wall media feature and eight Innovox Audio SL-2.1R loudspeakers are used for the Portals - four per portal, these are powered by eight Audio Science Hono CobraNet 2.2M amplifiers, while Merging Technology’s Ovation media server and three Peavey MediaMatrix NION N3 digital signal processors with CobraNet take care of audio control. “It took us a long time to get through the prototyping stage and choose the equipment,” said Stephan. “We had a lot of equipment shipped to the office and then we worked on them for several months
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