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Adlib supports China’s First Emperor and the Terracotta Warriors exhibition

Liverpool, UK based installation and production specialist Adlib is supplying video and audio for an exhibition featuring China’s Terracotta Warriors being staged at the city’s World Museum. China’s First Emperor and the Terracotta Warriors exhibition opened in February and is running until 28 October 2018.

Adlib’s head of video, Tom Edwards, is project managing and oversaw the process for which they partnered with immersive technology experts and digital studio Draw & Code as content creators and presented to National Museums Liverpool (NML).

“There wasn’t a specific existing technical brief in place” explaines Edwards, “So we listened to what they envisioned and came up with some solutions for how to achieve the atmosphere, sonically and visually in the five separate areas, all distinctly different”.

At the start, guests - around 40 at a time - enter the ‘Introduction to China’ area and immediately encounter a geo-wall, a 15 metre wide by 3 metre tall wall shaped like a stylised mountain range, custom built to fit the space. The lights dim and there is a presentation onto the wall about the global superpower that China is today, complete with the scent of cherry blossom.

The images are created with two Panasonic PT-RZ970 10,000 lumen laser projectors mapped across the wall. A Watchpax 4 media server is serving up the content to the duo of mapped and blended projectors; and also controlling the Crown amplifiers plus the Osborne Technologies scent generator. The audio installation comprises three Adlib AA61 speakers and AA12HL subs, run as a 3.1 surround system to give a 3D tone.

When the presentation finishes the doors open at the end of the room - also controlled via the media server and Visual Productions IOCore Artnet relay system - giving visitors their first glimpse of a terracotta horse and warrior before they pass into the second space, where they confront the ‘Warring States’.

This features two more Panasonic PT-RZ970 projectors and two 5.5 metre by 2 metre screens running down the length of the space above head height, driven by a Watchpax 2 and incorporating the same iPower IP-4 power control system found throughout the exhibition. The audioscape is delivered via Adlib AA81 speakers built-in to the screen, using quadraphonic audio.

The next area details the Qin Dynasty, with terracotta warriors from this period - including a kneeling stable boy in a case - and seven warriors side-by-side in a row with an 8 x 3 metre projection screen immediately behind, which is fed content via another three Panasonic RZ970s. The trio of projectors are portrait mounted using Rigtec adapters, modified to attach directly to an upright truss base. Panasonic’s ET-DLE030 lenses were then fitted giving a 0.36:1 throw ratio.

Next, visitors move into the Han Dynasty area where the focus is on showing the detail of the smaller warriors crafted during this era. There is an HD screen fed by another Panasonic PT-RZ970 projector fed from the same Watchpax 4 media server which is running the projections in the Qin presentation. 

Area 5 is the First Emperor’s Mausoleum; which to this day in real life, has never been opened. The tomb appears to be a hermetically sealed space roughly the size of a football pitch. The space includes a projection mapped, false vanishing point room. A Holo-gauze scrim creates a pepper’s ghost effect to the front.

Five Panasonic PT-RZ670 projectors are utilised, four to beam the projections onto the floor, sides and roof of the mausoleum for the dramatic show and one taking care of the scrim. Smoke effects appear on the front of the gauze, rivers of mercury are projected into the floor, climaxing with a booby trap, triggered by a bird flying through the space.

All the show scheduling is tied into a Dataton Watchnet server, which provides advanced show control of the Watchpax media servers and is the command centre for all the IP-controlled devices in the system. Some of the network infrastructure is built around a fibre backbone to accommodate the distances between areas.

A hardware-based VPN router is installed for fully remote network access, control and diagnostics of the entire system. A secondary software-based VPN allows redundant access to the network via a dedicated monitoring server, which runs a Linux-based instance of Zabbix for advanced logging, monitoring and diagnostics of the network.

(Photos: Steve Sroka)

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