Adam said
"Here’s a writeup with pics that I did on Shilo last year:
https://ebrandon.ca/buzzpost.aspx?buzz_id=623
Have to say that you’ve really outdone yourself this year Jason. Your display was always great but between the screens and new bulbs you’ve taken things to another level! Able to give us a better idea of what all is new and how long it takes to make these kinds of changes?
Just one comment for anyone that might be going out to check out this or any one of the major displays. Please stay in your car. The province has allowed drive-in events (which I'd say this falls into the realm of) as long as folks are from same household and stay in vehicles. When I drove by a couple days ago there was a car where everyone had gotten out together for selfies. We all want to keep the ability to enjoy these things after all of the blood, sweat and tears guys like Jason put in to put smiles on faces... but if that sort of thing became the norm and there ended up being what amounted to gatherings drawn I’d be concerned that the province would have to make some kind of update to health orders.
"
Thanks Adam!
This years new additions are upper rooflines, fence lines were upgraded to pixels, the RBL (Really Big Light) bulbs, the 7 mini trees, the projectors and the tune to sign was upgraded to a pixel matrix.
The RBL conversions took around 5 hours per fixture (i:ncludes 3d printing time).
The mini trees weren't too bad at about 2 hours a piece after getting the math figured out for the material sizing. Most of the time was spent putting proper ends on all the cables.
The projectors were a nightmare because I only have 5 feet to play with in the porch to get a 60" image and since I didn't really know if it would work well I didn't spend much on the projectors so they didn't have the adjustability that I am used to. I built about 4 different iterations of the mounting brackets until I came up with one that would work for this scenario (didn't want to spend money on the nice manfrotto mounts). We did a halloween show basically just to see if they would work at all for the Christmas show and they actually did a very good job.
The tune to sign is a matrix panel that we can now add graphics and effects to.
Everything in our show is either custom made or modified to suit our requirements. I'm not good with design but know what I like so will commonly take aspects from multiple products to make my own version (there are no copyright issues as it is an open community and we all build on others ideas).
This year I changed the software I build the show on so it has really been a learning year in addition to building these new props that have been in the works for years (I purchased the lights to do all these likely 3 years ago but family, work and other projects kept taking priority)
I have lost track of number of lights (but this year we are only running 3 of the 4 arches and 2 of the 4 singing bulbs as there are no choral tracks in the show this year) so our light count is likely reduced from last year because of that. Those three items alone make up around around 2 thousand lights. I can tell you we are just under 150,000 controllable channels though.
Next years show is already being planned. Orders for lights typically get placed in January and usually arrive by June. I need to add a bunch more pixels as some of the effects in the show this year looked a little funny because they didn't have enough definition... But there's only so much you can do with a smaller house. I have thought of turning the display sideways facing Frederick St. but the hill between Rosser and Princess concerns me in the winter as it gets rather slippery so we don't want to push extra traffic into possible danger.