The Christie® YK200 dual-arm yoke was part of the recent twenty-fifth anniversary celebration of Shark Week, the popular Discovery Channel program that details the lives of one of nature’s most intriguing and feared predators. Attended by press, producers, and friends of the network from around the world, the festivities took place at the Beverly Hilton hotel poolside.
Part of the Christie Nitro Solutions family of moving digital luminaires, the Christie YK200 featured an installed Christie Roadster HD20K-J 3-chip DLP® projector displaying moving sharks in the pool while six Christie Roadster S+20K 3-chip DLP projectors displayed images of the imposing creatures on a large wall.
“The six Christie Roadster S+20K projectors created a 1:3 blend that was then stacked for double brightness,” said Joel St-Denis, product manager, Christie. “A Christie YK200 yoke with a Christie HD20K-J projector was used to move sharks around the entire pool, achieving with a single projector what would normally require several projectors.”
Designed for staging and event applications, Christie Nitro Solutions offers three yoke models to choose from. Each yoke provides a platform to move and control a variety of Christie video projectors via DMX protocol—allowing integration of lighting equipment and video projectors easily with the same control console. These versatile yokes can be flown, rigged or set up at floor level, according to application needs.
“The reason that I love [Christie] Nitro is because it moves a 20K projector,” said Bart Kresa, principal, BARTKRESA Design. “And in this event … in order to do this across the whole pool, we probably would have had to set up six 20K projectors. With the [Christie] Nitro, we can use one projector and then create an animation. When we move the animation and the projector around, it looks natural. The sharks are moving around the pool but it sort of gives the sense that the whole pool is filled with an image.”
Contributing to the success of the ‘Shark Week’ display provided by Nitro Solutions was the Pandora’s Box media manager and server, which, according to Jared Leunis of coolux® Media Systems managed the movement of the Christie YK200 yoke and the sharks’ movement throughout the pool.
“Five years ago, doing something like this was quite a bit more difficult because we had to measure and calculate everything, and everything had to be very, very precise,” concluded Kresa. “The cool thing about the new technology is that working with digital projectors and with digital tools, we can pre-design everything.”
For more information, visit www.christiedigital.com.
