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Corona: Over 700 Elation lights for 2020 Illumination - Tree Lights at The Morton Arboretum
For The Morton Arboretum, the idea of not running Illumination this past holiday season was not an option, says Lightswitch principal John Featherstone about the wintertime lighting display in Lisle, Illinois. Illumination continues to shine through after being redesigned for a drive-thru experience using additional Elation luminaires, the eighth year for the project.
“The motivating force behind why the Arboretum decided to pivot Illumination to a driving experience was not only to ensure guest safety in the middle of a pandemic, but also because we all felt there was something we owed the local community”, says Featherstone. “For seven years, we’ve asked the guests of the Chicago area to come to the Arboretum and we felt a responsibility to honor that. This has been a year of ‘no’s’ and it would have been easy for the Arboretum to have skipped this year, but we wanted to deliver something to the people of Chicagoland that was a ‘yes’.”
The new driving experience includes favorite lighting displays re-envisioned along with six newly designed sights displayed along a two-mile road among the Arboretum’s trees. Guests immerse themselves in woodlands and landscapes filled with dramatic lighting and color-changing illumination, and they do it from the comfort and safety of their own car.
With guests sitting in their cars instead of walking a path closer to nature, Featherstone says they had to let go of what they’ve done in the past and focus on what they could do. “We didn’t want to try and make it feel simply like the walking experience from inside a car”, he says. “In order to make it feel like something new we had to rethink it through the lens, or in this case the window, of what it’s like to be in a vehicle which is very different than viewing it when walking the trail.” The designer says the team would usually spend a lot of time talking about things like the shape of a tree or how color plays on different textures of bark. “But that goes out the window when you look at it from a car window. You’re just not close enough to the arbor, and you’re in constant motion so you don’t get those moments to stop and linger.”
Besides having to make displays shorter in duration due to the increased tempo, the tint of the vast majority of car windows reduce a certain amount of the light. “It was a dramatic difference. The whole display needed to be brighter due to the difference in color and saturation when viewed through the automobile glass”, says Featherstone. Projection mapping onto trees was dropped this year for the same reason. Another important difference was the more horizontal “cinema display” aspect ratio one gets from looking out a car window. “We couldn’t guide the eye from the base of the tree to its crown to reveal the majesty of the tree for example.” Another change this year was the opportunity for driving guests to listen to specially curated music on a dedicated radio station.
The result of the changes, Featherstone says, is a show that was more visually dynamic than past years with more Elation Professional luminaires used than ever before. Over 700 Elation fixtures form the foundation of the lighting including 33 x IP65 Proteus Beam and 47 x Proteus Hybrid moving heads, 190 x Arena Q7 Zoom PAR wash lights, 438 x Level Q7 IP RGBW PAR lights, and four units of the 50,000-lumen Proteus Maximus.
Lightswitch works closely with Intelligent Lighting Creations (ILC) on the Illumination project and again this year the Illinois-based design and rental house supplied the lighting fixtures.
(Photos: Matthew Taylor/Michael Hudson/The Morton Arboretum)
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