Coke light: grandMA illuminates giant Coca Cola bottle in Atlanta

Tuesday, July 24, 2007 || MA Lighting

The grandMA meets an icon in the new world of Coca-Cola, the $100 million Coke museum which opened at a new site in Atlanta and is expected to draw about 1.2 million visitors in its first year. The grandMA provides lighting control for a 30-foot tall replica of Cokes famous contour bottle which is encased in a 90-foot, ice-like glass cylinder suspended above the lobby entrance.

Lighting designers Michael Creason and Seth Rapaport of Visionary Light & Media in Montverde, Florida were charged with illuminating the iconic bottle and creating lighting effects for the attention-getting signage. Within the bottle are 216 x Color Kinetics ColorCast 14 fixtures, 10 x Flutes, 96 x Birkett Strobes and 1 x Coemar par. Each six-foot high level of two-ply glass panels forming the glass cylinder, which goes from opaque to translucent to give the illusion of ice, is outfitted with 104 x Color Kinetics Color Blast 12s.

The client came to us with the fixtures already specified and purchased, notes Creason. They wanted us to figure out how to use them and control them, how to get maximum impact for the project. In that kind of situation the grandMA was a given. With the grandMA we get an extraordinary amount of control over the fixtures in the glass tower and within the Coke bottle itself.

Creason and Rapaport werent just shining lights on the giant Coke bottle: They were creating effects lighting which could be customized for different scenarios. Since flexibility was key, the lighting designers crafted full-scale mock ups of the bottle and tower and prepared a number of demos using grandMA 3D. The grandMAs interactive capabilities enabled the lighting designers to install a fiber-optic network for console communication and possible patron interactivity.

Ethernet connectivity meant Creason and Rapaport could be at a distance to observe the lighting effects on the bottle and tower. They deployed a grandMA light to control and send commands to the main grandMA and used a wireless router to trigger color changes from a PDA. The client loved it, says Creason. Its something unique to the grandMA, and everyone is always impressed by it. We love it, too! The grandMA has even more remote capabilities. If the company wants to put together a special presentation they can email us ideas, we can preprogram an entire show and send a return email with an attachment, Creason points out.

The systems flexibility also means it can be customized to control lighting for corporate events or holidays. We can use the grandMA to control other lights and interact with the bottle, Creason says. If someone comes in with lights for a particular event we can interact with them. The agenda - a really genius function triggers lighting cues based on the time of day; it knows when sunset occurs based on the systems GPS. The lighting designers had the goal of setting up a system which required minimal user interaction and which wouldn't forget where it is in case of a power failure on site. The grandMA gives us a lot of confidence, says Rapaport. Its a product we can work with and know were not going to get panicked phone calls.

"It is an honor having the grandMA on this project with Michael and Seth. They are designing the lighting of a cultural icon that will be viewed by millions of people every year," comments A.C.T Lighting President and CEO Bob Gordon. "This project seems simple enough to the viewing public but it took a lot of work and wizardry to make it work that way. Kudos to Michael and Seth." A.C.T. Lighting is the North American distributor of the grandMA.

Design Communications, Ltd. fabricated the Coke bottle and tower signage. Production Resource Group was the system integrator.