USA - The new World of Coca-Cola, the $100 million Coke museum which opened at a new site in Atlanta, features a 30ft tall replica of Coke's famous contour bottle which is encased in a 90ft, ice-like glass cylinder suspended above the lobby entrance, with lighting control via a grandMA.

Lighting designers Michael Creason and Seth Rapaport of Visionary Light & Media in Montverde, Florida, were charged with illuminating the iconic bottle and creating lighting effects for the attention-getting signage. Within the bottle are 216 Color Kinetics ColorCast 14 fixtures, 10 Flutes, 96 Birkett Strobes and one Coemar PAR. Each six-foot high level of two-ply glass panels forming the glass cylinder, which goes from opaque to translucent to give the illusion of ice, is outfitted with 104 x Color Kinetics Color Blast 12s.

"The client came to us with the fixtures already specified and purchased," notes Creason. "They wanted us to figure out how to use them and control them, how to get maximum impact for the project. In that kind of situation the grandMA was a given. With the grandMA we get an extraordinary amount of control over the fixtures in the glass tower and within the Coke bottle itself."

Since flexibility was key, the lighting designers crafted full-scale mock-ups of the bottle and tower and prepared a number of demos using grandMA 3D. The grandMA's interactive capabilities enabled the lighting designers to install a fibre-optic network for console communication and possible patron interactivity.

(Jim Evans)


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