The mosaics of Otranto Cathedral in Sicily and the symbols in Michelangelo’s paving for his 16th-century remodeling of Piazza del Campidoglio in Rome were Marco Balich’s inspiration for his concept of Expo 2015’s Tree of Life, a 37m-tall steel and wood structure with a circumference of 45m, turned into a practical design by Gio Forma and constructed by the Orgoglio Brescia consortium for the Italian city’s Universal Exhibition (May 1 to October 31). More than 140 participating countries and 20 million visitors are expected at the 1.1 million square meter exhibition area in Milan.
With more than 20 years’ experience in the entertainment industry, Balich, chairman of Balich Worldwide Shows, is also artistic director of Expo 2015’s Italy pavilion and a leading figure worldwide in the creation and production of key shows and events. These include the opening and closing ceremonies of Turin’s 2006 Winter Olympics, the 2007 Fiat 500 world preview, the closing ceremony of Sochi 2014 Winter Olympics, and the opening and closing ceremonies of Sochi 2014 Paralympics. He is also executive producer of the 2016 Rio Olympic ceremonies.
In addition to being the physical symbol of the conceptual route through the Italy pavilion, the Tree, a meeting point and one of the most-seen features at the Expo, is an exciting multimedia installation, with a unique combination of Renaissance artistic influences and leading-edge AVL technology. It stands in the center of what is reportedly Europe’s largest fountain, 90m in diameter, with tiered seating for 3,000 people.
All three partners at Milan-based media architecture and production design specialists Gio Forma—Florian Boje, Claudio Santucci, and Cristiana Picco—worked on the tree’s concept and design. “The tree’s architecture is technically an ‘extrusion’ of the Campidoglio Square’s paving, as if it had been raised and rotated into a vertical position, forming a crown,” Boje explains. “This, plus the trunk and the ‘skirt’ at the bottom of the tree, are formed by load-bearing wood components—the wooden parts alone weigh approximately 90 tons—and the internal metal column has a spiral staircase enabling access to the show’s hardware.” The trunk was formed by 24—12 left-hand and 12 right-hand—124m spirals of layered larch wood with various cross-sections. The crown was assembled at the base of the trunk and then lifted into position and connected to the center tube with 48 high-carbon spring steel cables on top and 24 steel plates below.
Koert Vermeulen and his Brussels-based lighting design firm, ACT Lighting Design, were commissioned to create the lighting scenography of the iconic installation. Twelve shows were created for 1,270 performances, with a dynamic combination of lighting, video, water, mist, lasers, pyrotechnics, and even bubbles, which bring the tree and the surrounding lake to life. To produce the shows, Vermeulen, as lighting designer and director of mise en scene, filled each part of the steel and wooden structure and the surrounding water with lighting and video equipment, mounting the majority of fixtures directly and embedding them in the structure to hide the light sources. Each component on the steel and wooden parts of the structure can be controlled independently or in groups, enabling the tree to transform as the hours go by and attracting 20,000 spectators every day.
Tree Transformation
The audio, lighting, and video contractor for the project was L’Aquila-based Agorà, one of the largest rental firms in Europe. It specializes in every kind of musical, corporate, sporting, and large-scale event. In addition to winning the tender for supplying the audio system for Sochi’s 2014 Winter Olympics and Paralympics opening and closing ceremonies, high-profile events on which it has worked through the years include the opening and closing ceremonies of the 2006 Winter Olympics and Paralympics, the world launch of the new Fiat 500, Pope John Paul II’s funeral, the beatification of Mother Teresa of Calcutta, as well as classical and opera events and international tours by top Italian and foreign artists.
The rig’s 60 Clay Paky Mythos fixtures were chosen by Vermeulen “for their strong beam functions, incredible speed, and the purity of the open white they produce. Their color-mixing is also fantastic, allowing me to achieve a wonderfully vibrant red, which I used for accent color.” Positioned around the Lake Arena, at the base of the tree and at the top, creating an impressive aerial display, the Mythos are protected from adverse weather conditions by Clay Paky’s UV-resistant polycarbonate Igloo enclosures.
The rest of the lighting setup includes 5,000m of Unitech Strip LED P60 DMX, 1278 ArchWork Arcdot LEDs for internal tree lighting, and 270 Showtec Cameleon Flood 7 RGB units. Sixty strips of LED “twinkle” lights provide illumination for internal “vegetation,” six on each of 10 of the tree’s 11 levels, along with 130 Teclumen PAR 56 Color TKX units for illuminating a bubbling water effect and four Harman Martin Professional MAC 2000 XB wash beams for backlighting on the water screen. The MA Lighting control system includes a grandMA2 light and Replay unit, plus two MA2 Network Processing Units.
Fabio Ciccone was in charge of the Agorà video setup. “We used six Christie Roadie HD+35Ks and four Roadster HD20K-Js for the projection mapping on the tree’s trunk and projections on the water screen behind the tree, respectively,” he says. “The heart of the show is a Syncronorm V:Server standalone DMX show player, featuring a fully customizable user interface, Art-Net, full RDM support, timecode, and the flexible BMI system for any logic sequences. An ELC Node is used to convert Art-Net commands into pure DMX signals.”
The V:server sends a feed to the audio systems and SMPTE timecode to a splitter, where it is fed to the MA Lighting control system, the lasers, and a coolux Pandoras Box rack that houses two Managers (main and backup), two players with eight outputs for the projectors, a player for the water screen projections, two network switchers, and five players for the Strip LED lights.
A d3 technologies system, including d3 software and a d3 4×2pro media server, handled all the pre-viz and sequencing before being rendered out to the Pandoras Box for playback. Jo Pauly of Visual Solutions in Hoeilaart, Belgium, spearheaded the d3 pre-viz. “The server’s strong simulation tool was very helpful in the pre-production process," he says. "We combined a lighting simulation software for the lighting, with Syncronorm, for the fountains, to give a good understanding of the actual show.”
“In the beginning, we were to use d3 to combine the projection mapping with driving 600-plus Art-Net universes, something we could work out in pre-viz in advance,” Pauly explains. The team programmed, calibrated the projectors, and ran the first show with a d3s 4×2pro.
The Waterworks
Two hundred-fifty interactive fountain nozzles, some able to shoot water up to a height of 35m, were supplied by specialist firm Watercube of Marano Vicentino for the lake hosting the Tree. The nozzles are 208 Choreoswitch 1.5'' SWS nozzles, 42 Titan Air Driven Nozzles, and a Water Screen nozzle fed by a 75kW pump and used to form a projection area 20m high and 35m wide. The firm also installed 500 Crystal Fountains 30W and 60W stainless steel underwater RGB LED fixtures.
Watercube also installed water effects in numerous other locations at the Expo, as president Gianfranco Deganello explains. “Thanks also to new [nozzle] technology, we reduced electricity consumption to approximately a tenth of that used by traditional technology, ensuring spectacular results while respecting the environment,” he says. “In fact, compressed air is used to shoot out the water gathered in tanks at each nozzle, and the height and frequency of each individual jet is regulated via DMX protocol, which operates on the electronics of the control panel each nozzle is equipped with.”
Laser Entertainment of Cologno Monzese and Rome provided a Kvant Spectrum 32W RGB solid-state laser with a Cambridge Technology high-resolution laser graphic optical scanner, controlled via a Pangolin LD2000 Pro Beyond system in the control room, connected via fiber and Ethernet with a Pangolin QM2000.NET hardware platform installed in the laser’s casing. General manager Alberto Kellner, who supervised and coordinated the installation’s technical and safety aspects, notes, “The laser that projects on a water screen in the lake and on the Italia Pavilion is at a distance of 200m, so it had to be mounted in a special turret to enable it to stand up to extreme operating conditions for the expo’s six-month duration. The laser is run in sync with the other media and the show’s timeline via SMPTE with an Adrem TC1 USB timecode reader/generator.”
The L-Acoustics audio rig deployed comprises two clusters, each with 10 V-DOSC and three dV-DOSC enclosures, plus eight SB28 subwoofers in end-fire configuration positioned at each cluster. Power is via 12 LA8 amplified controllers, with loudspeaker management by Meyer Sound’s Galileo. A Yamaha 02R audio console used for service facilities sits in the underground lakeside control room alongside a Tascam X-48 Mk2 48-track hard disk recorder. Music for the main show is by Roberto Cacciapaglia.
The pyro contractor on the Tree of Life shows, Parente Fireworks, headquartered in Melara, Italy, has worked on major international events on five continents. Antonio Parente, creative director and partner, adds, “To fire 24,000 effects over the period of the Expo, we installed a setup that includes 12 DMX firing systems, 16 wireless firing systems, a DMX interface for smoke effects, and an SMPTE wireless firing transmitter, all Parente Firemaster units.”
The Expo runs through the end of October.
Mike Clark, ex-sound engineer, road manager, radio personality, and club DJ, is a UK-born journalist residing in Italy and specializing in entertainment-related technology. He has contributed to LD under its four names for 20 years, and, as well as contributing to UK, Russian, and Italian periodicals, also works as a technical translator for audio and lighting manufacturers.
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