To mark 100 years and celebrate the holiday season, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA)’s Metro-North Railroad subsidiary and partner Toshiba contracted with designer Michiru Tanaka and Babylon, NY-based Bestek Lighting & Staging, Inc. to add a festive seasonal touch to the west side windows of the Main Concourse at Grand Central Terminal in New York City. Bestek handled engineering, custom hardware, installation labor, programming, technical direction and logistics for the project, and the company’s president, Van Allen Rice, served as project manager onsite.
A Unique Opportunity
“It seems that our lot is to work in fairly offbeat venues — museums, train terminals or French restaurants,” Rice says, “so the idea of lighting the terminal windows was really exciting. We’ve had a relationship with Metro-North and Grand Central for several years, and have done holiday light shows in their other event spaces, but on a smaller scale. I think we were a good fit because we knew the people and their concerns, and what had to happen to make things flow smoothly.”
Working in such a public and historic space, the Bestek team overcame several hurdles. With at least a quarter million travelers visiting GCT daily — which can swell to more than 700,000 during the peak holiday season — security is paramount. Additionally, all materials used had to be flame retardant and up to code. Finally, there were aesthetic requirements made by Metro-North for the install.
“Over the years,” Rice explains, “if there was a solution that we liked, we’d just do it in-house, so that’s the way we looked at this job. Metro-North were very helpful in terms of letting us know what we could and couldn’t do, and we built a system and installed it behind the terminal’s antique windows.
“We’re essentially theatre people, and we’re not wired to do just lighting or just staging; we’ve always been multifaceted. It keeps things interesting, and allows us to come up with innovative solutions for certain problems. If there’s a lighting problem that can be solved scenically, we think that’s great. Every set we build has never been built before — they’re all prototypical. That inventiveness is part of our theatrical heritage. It’s our background, and it’s a part of us.”
LED Gear and Control
To bring Tanaka’s design to life — and match the number of available windows — the Bestek team provided 354 custom-rigged Martin Stagebar 54 LED fixtures, with a grandMA full size console for control. The grandMA full console drove a Green Hippo Hippotizer V3 HD media server using Pixelmapper to output the 24-universe show design via Art-Net.
Bestek’s in-house LD Kevin O’Brien served as production electrician, and worked with Rice to spec the gear. Bestek’s Buddy Braile served as technical director on the project. “We just counted the panes and filled them up,” says Rice. “With each window sized at about 13.5 inches wide, we realized we needed a fixture not much wider, as they had to be placed right next to each other. We also wanted them to daisy chain together easily. One benefit of the Martin Stagebars is that you can control six individual cells in each fixture; it allowed for a more subtle creation of the images. You wouldn’t just bump from one color to another in two window panes; you could almost fade from a color to another in successive panes.”
Another challenge was to find a vendor that had this many units available for two months, and that led Bestek to Mainlight Industries, who they’ve worked with for years. “Mainlight were incredibly helpful in sending us fixtures for tests, consulting with us, and setting aside inventory — even before we had the job,” Rice says.
O’Brien adds, “Once we had narrowed down the fixture choice, I started looking for who might have 375 of them in their rental stock. I called Mainlight and asked Rick, ‘What do you have 375 of — do you have Martin Stagebar shorts?’ When he told me they had nearly 400, I asked him to put them all on hold and to send me a few fixtures. We built a mock up in the shop from wood and Plexiglas, and popped a few of them in to see how they fit. At that point, we decided that this was the correct fixture to use, based on size. At the throw distance we were using, any fixture would be bright enough to put out sufficient light, but these were incredibly bright. The greater depth of pixels was another selling point. When we scrolled text horizontally we were able to smooth it out so it wasn’t jumping in 16-inch increments, but in 1.5-inch increments, which helped with the show tremendously.”
The Early Stages
As part of the request for proposal, designer Michiru Tanaka sent her initial rendering to Bestek, prompting the team to perform some preliminary tests in their shop. Rice then hit the spreadsheets and created a proposal to do the job. “The initial concept was that the general public could access a website and create designs on the windows. The equipment list was already settled, so it became about how the software and the security would interface. Ultimately, Toshiba, Grand Central and Bestek decided it was better not to have the public color in the squares on the website.”
Michiru worked with content creator Sean Cagney to produce the final show. An obvious hurdle for the creative team was image resolution. “The windows of Grand Central, viewed as an LED wall, provide extremely coarse resolution,” says Rice, “so little fine nuances of clouds or waves just weren’t going to work. It had to be dynamic, strong moving imagery, so that concept was a constant throughout the creative process. We’d love to have Santa in a sleigh, but we’re not going to see enough detail to understand what it is. So those were the choices that Sean and Michiru made.”
Toshiba requested an initial onsite test, so the Bestek team installed lights in three of the window panes to demonstrate the color changing potential and output of the Martin fixtures. Rice adds, “Metro-North attended the demo as well — as a test of how the equipment would be installed and its safety features — so the demo served a number of purposes besides confirming we were on the right track.”
Custom Window Treatments
Another of Metro-North’s requirements led to Bestek’s creation of custom window treatments that solved two distinct issues, light reflection and daytime visibility. “With lights on a clear pane of glass, you don’t see anything; they need a medium to reflect on or the glass has to be translucent,” Rice explains. “So we borrowed from theatre and used what we call a ‘bounce drop’ behind each light. We first tried everything from a plastic to muslin and spandex, and some of them worked quite well, until we turned the lights off. Metro-North said, ‘We know daylight’s going to come through, but you can look up there and see there’s something in there, and we don’t like that.’ My staging department head suggested white Textilene, so we tried that and they loved it. Unless you know what to look for, it looks like there’s nothing in the windows, so it fit perfectly. It’s flame retardant and certified, and I think it looks great on the display.”
To provide acceptable engineering specifications for the Metro-North engineers and safety personnel, Bestek’s steel shop utilized recognized steel components for most of the fixture mounting points. “There wasn’t a whole lot of welding, but it was a lot of cutting,” Rice points out. “We were initially thinking we’d have to make special brackets, but we decided that off the shelf hardware would work if configured a certain way. We used Kindorf and standard beam clamps, but there’s rubber between the beam clamps and the building steel. Over at Metro-North, the engineers really like products with a manufacturer’s spec — in terms of loads and fire resistance — that they recognize, and we needed to streamline that process. In terms of the steel fabrication, there’s more quantity in terms of the clamps, nuts and bolts, keeping it all straight, and putting a lot of connections together. That’s fine, I’ve got guys that are really skilled in doing that.”
Tweaking the Content
A key player in the success of the final product was content creator Sean Cagney. O’Brien says, “We knew we were going to drive this off the Hippo. I needed someone that was fast and understood the intricacies of what we were trying to do, and also creative enough to help with creating content if needed. We brought Sean in as the Hippo programmer, but his role morphed and eventually he was hired through his company, Amazing Industries, to create all the content.”
Cagney says, “At the start, I was the programmer/system engineer for the rig, because someone had to verify all that content, but the job changed after my initial contact when we decided to go strictly with rendered media. We created a mockup for the first demo. Michiru had a storyboard with framed colors moving through the windows vertically, so I animated that and made scrolling logos, simple patterns and gradients to move across the rows of the window. We were able to show how it interacted with the architecture, and it looked very different from scene to scene. Overall, it was very impressive. Grand Central has done moving lights many times, and they’ve hung PIGI projection, which definitely gave it an interesting holiday vibe, but this was definitely a unique look for that space in a holiday show.”
Along with Cagney’s pixel mapping skills, the project got a boost from Josh Fleitell, who was brought in to help with the Hippo pixel mapping and to fuse the content. “Playback speed was an issue at first,” says Sean. “Content can’t move very quickly on a large surface like that, and colors need to have great contrast because we’re only working in 8-bit DMX. One concern was that it would be too bright, as it was basically being built out of LED blinders. But we can animate to what intensity things are — when you make a color darker in your media, the LED still turns on in the same color; it just doesn’t have the same punch. LEDs require a different programming mindset than lighting or video.”
The Hippo server analyzes a video clip and estimates color in to interpolate that video into three control channels for the red, green, and blue LEDs. As Cagney say, “it’s 270 pixels wide and eight pixels tall, so on one hand, it seems like you’re making really simple low res animation; however, it’s one thing to add a layer of pixel mapping around a video screen just to pick up color, but when the low res is your full display, you have to draw every element specifically for it. Trying to stretch or shrink something into the system becomes illegible, especially with specific elements like Christmas tree, snow falling, and especially text, so you have to make everything by hand.”
Cagney adds that, while the created content is basically “simple images,” it can be “very time-consuming” to pull off. “We created a piece where white dots traveled over colored lines, representing the three primary Metro North Train lines, and in order to properly map those white dots across the lines, I took what was built in Photoshop, exported into Cinema 4D and built a full 3D particle system that moved along all the layers, and then exported 10 minutes of each train line, then layering it together into After Effects to composite into the full animation.” While the final product “appears simple, it takes that much construction to get the motion just right. In order to build certain things, you have to do all the same work you would with high resolution, then simplify it down — precisely — to your actual pixels.”
A Smooth Load-In
By all accounts, load-in and installation went smoothly with no hitches or glitches. O’Brien and other Bestek team members, who have plenty of experience in overcoming logistical hurdles, spent two weeks onsite — one week for the installation and another for running and tweaking content, all under the watchful eyes of both NYPD and Homeland Security.
“We’ve done some amazing jobs in this company, but most of them have been for individuals or corporations and the public rarely gets to see what we can do,” concludes Rice. “This is certainly the largest public event we’ve been a part of, and we’re very excited by the hundreds of thousands of people going through the terminal. We value our relationship with Metro-North, and we’re really proud to be involved in this project, and proud that Toshiba had faith in us — it’s been really a great experience.”
