Pink Floyd still king of the laser shows
Posted on November 18, 2008
Filed Under Technology |
For classic rock fans of a certain vintage, it’s a rite of passage up there with attending your first concert, or sneaking your first beer. And for others, it might be as close as they will get to seeing an old-fashioned 1970s arena rock spectacle.
We’re referring to the 30-year tradition known as the Pink Floyd “Dark Side of the Moon” Laser Show.
“It’s been the most popular laser show of all laser shows since the beginning of laser shows,” says Joanne Young, managing director of Orlando-based Audio Visual Imagineering. The Floyd show, cued to the landmark 1973 album, has been traveling the country since the early 1980s.
From the “Dark Side” show to other programs cued to Floyd’s “The Wall,” the music of the Beatles, Metallica, Led Zeppelin, U2 and holiday music, AVI has cornered the market on the genre.
“Pink Floyd’s music really lends itself to lasers and planetariums and music under the stars … you match those things together and something really magical happens,” says Young. “I don’t know why … but there is an older audience that loves it and continues to come.”
AVI patented a full-dome projection system in 1992 that throws the visuals 360 degrees across a planetarium dome for a more immersive experience than the laser shows of old, which typically covered only 60 percent of the dome. Young says visitors to the show at Norwood’s Drake Planetarium will see a series of abstract images so tightly choreographed to the music that “you won’t know where the music starts and the visuals end, or if the visuals are making the music, or the music is making the visuals.”
While AVI provides the laser projector - which has one red and one green laser diode that mix and create red, yellow and green images - the planetariums add in the stars as a background, as well as other visuals that include everything from clouds to special effects.
Young says you can expect to hear such landmark tracks as “Money” accompanied by comical images of a pig and a sly fox chasing each other across the dome trying to steal each other’s bags of money.
Pam Bowers, director of the Drake Planetarium, says the run of the Floyd show earlier this year brought out not only the over-30 crowd, but also families and some curious younger patrons. The planetarium is also running its Halloween-themed “Spooktacular” laser program.
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