Light vs Liquid: LEGOLAND Keeps it Dry Creating CHI

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Image Courtesy of florida.legoland.com

Amidst dramatic landscapes and the magical waters flowing from Mount Cavora, families visiting LEGOLAND® Florida have the opportunity to embark on an interactive water ride called “The Quest for CHI.” The park’s design team, striving to bring the LEGO® World of Chima to life, looked for ways to effectively create a mystical liquid energy source called CHI. Needing to be sensitive about the cost and maintenance issues involved with installing water features to create the effect, they turned to Rosco to project their CHI with lighting effects that gave them stunning, realistic results from equipment that was controllable, reliable and easy-to-maintain.

The queue for “Quest for CHI” brings riders into the iconic Lion Temple from the Chima story, where they’ll see Lagravis, king of the Lion tribe, standing guard over the mystical CHI pool. On the wall behind Lagravis a cascade of CHI falls down and feeds into the pool.  Rather than choosing an expensive and difficult-to-maintain water feature, the LEGOLAND designers turned to projected light to create the mystical effect.

In this case, they installed a GAM SX4 with a loop tray and the Fire/Waves FX/Loop into an ETC Source 4 mounted underneath Lagravis’ pedestal to project the cascading CHI onto the wall behind the the LEGO® statue. Thanks to the average lifespan of 4,000 hours of the GAM FX/ Loops inside an SX4, the system provides stunning, easy to maintain effects for any themed environment.

The mystical CHI pool created by Rosco’s X24 Effects projector

The same approach was taken to create the mystical pool of CHI that Lagravis so dutifully defends.  In order to match the projected cascade of CHI that appears to feed into the pool, and to avoid the maintenance issues an actual pool of water would present, the brilliant CHI effect is created using Rosco’s X24 Effects Projector mounted on the ceiling directly above the pool. The X24 allowed the designers to easily control the speed, direction, and beam shape of the effect, while keeping the queue clean, dry, and easy-to-maintain thanks to the X24’s robust mechanical engineering and its 7,000 hour lamp life.

Thanks to the design & maintenance crews at LEGOLAND® Florida for assisting me with capturing the photos & videos and for sharing their story of this installation.