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Dollywood Wildwood Grove Tree illuminated by Elation

Eastern Tennessee’s Dollywood theme park debuted a new land in June 2019 - Wildwood Grove - at whose heart is a magical Wildwood Tree illuminated using Elation Professional luminaires with lighting design by Susan Rose.

The Wildwood Tree comes to life each evening during a light and sound experience created by The Imagination House for Dollywood and narrated by the park’s co-owner Dolly Parton. Designed and built by LifeFormations, the 50-foot tree’s gnarled trunk emerges from a rock base before spreading into a green-leaf canopy covered with 650 custom RGB LED butterflies, controlled and programmed by Weigl Controls.

Lighting designer and lighting programmer for four separate seasonal experiences is local resident Susan Rose. She has previously designed lighting for Dollywood shows and spent nearly a year on the Wildwood Tree project. “When I started on the project the tree didn’t even exist yet so we really started from the ground up,” Rose comments, adding that she was given a sample piece of the tree trunk to see how light would react on it.

Lighting installers/vendors Bandit Lites also got involved in the project early on, she says, and were critical in setting up demos and helping her look at the various lighting possibilities. “I knew we needed outdoor-rated lights to fight with Mother Nature and we needed something to shine through at dusk. Bandit recommended we go with Elation.”

Each season of the year features a new Wildwood Tree experience for guests with narration accompanied by music and light projection onto the tree in concert with the color-changing butterflies. As the Wildwood Tree is a 360-degree experience, Rose positioned lighting fixtures on four poles to illuminate the tree from all four sides.

Mounted on each pole - each pole is at a different throw distance - are four Proteus Maximus LED profile moving heads, four SixPar 300 LED Par lights and four LED lekos. The SixPars splash an array of color onto the rock base, tree trunk and canopy while the 50,000-lumen Maximus units project custom gobos onto the tree to enhance story telling through custom patterns and animations.

Each Proteus Maximus fixture houses custom gobos with a few stock gobos also in use. Rose says that specific gobos play a key role in the storytelling - butterflies, lightning, dragonflies, Christmas ornaments, snow or leaves that fall down from the top of the tree - and needed to be indexed properly. “I had to put some thought into which gobos go into which wheel and what slot, which ones needed to index and which ones could go on the static wheel, keeping in mind how I could create transitions,” she says. Rose was one of the first in the U.S. to use the Proteus Maximus.

With three different zones of the tree to light - rock, trunk and canopy - Rose worked in layers of light to create visual depth, working with intensity, color and pattern. Elation Rayzor 760 RGBW washlights with zoom are located in planters along the bottom of the rock face and used to uplight the tree and underpart of the canopy in layers of color.

Color-changing SixPar 200 IP Pars mounted within the rock base uplight the canopy in greens or blues while the pole-mounted SixPar 300 LEDs add more shades. Additional layers of color emanate from Acclaim Lighting Dyna Accent Mini architectural fixtures hidden along the base of the tree while color-mixing Lekos project onto rocks and the trunk for added texture. The layered lighting looks work in tandem with the 650 butterflies in the canopy, whose every wing can receive pixel-mapped color and effects.

Each experience is a few minutes long with ample time between shows to enjoy the area and the beauty of the tree itself. “During the shows there is a lot of color but for our static look in-between shows I wanted it to look like a real tree,” Rose explains. “I keep the gobos out of focus to give it some depth and contour and on the rocks I added a bit of steel blue to make it look like a real rock. On the trunk, I added a bit of amber and for the canopy, I added a bit of green. I was basically painting the tree with light and accenting the natural colors that were in it to make it look real.” Only the LED Pars and Lekos are used for the static looks, she says.

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