Back to Top
Back to Top
Sue the T. Rex is the Lady Gaga of the dinosaur community. The magnificent murderbird (a favorite term to describe the T. Rex) has an often-hilarious Twitter feed, legions of adoring fans, and a brand new home in the Chicago Field Museum’s Griffin Halls of Evolving Planet. Lighting and AV presentation for Sue’s new home were designed by Lightswitch Chicago, using ETC and Xicato luminaires, and ETC controls.
Although the fossil is named after Sue Hendrickson, who discovered the skeleton in South Dakota in 1990, Sue the T.Rex may not even be female. (They use the pronouns they/them/their.) This is just one of the facts learned about Sue since their discovery and exhibition at the Field Museum in 2000.
Sue’s move to their own 5,000-square-foot area, The Griffin Halls of Evolving Planet, was completed months ahead of schedule to satisfy a clamoring public. Following a three-month prototyping phase to show the curators how Sue would be lit in their new quarters, the design team at Lightswitch Chicago produced a meticulously cued AV presentation worthy of the world’s most expensive ($8.7 million) fossil.
“Conservation of the delicate stones and resins is very important - Sue will receive about a quarter of the light, and none of the direct sunlight, they did before,” says Thatcher Waller, Senior Lighting Designer for Lightswitch Chicago.
The project called for the complex integration of control protocols and diverse fixture types including ETC Source Four LED Series 2 andColorSource fixtures, as well as fixtures from another vendor, Xicato, that are wirelessly controlled using DMX over Bluetooth. System Integrator Ivan Jones expected a “sandstorm” but was pleasantly surprised. “ETC did special programming for the job. Chris Price wrote an entire new control module inside Mosaic to speak to Xicato. They handed me a product that worked – I never had to patch it.”
In fact, this is the world’s first execution of the interoperability between ETC Mosaic and Xicato Controls. “We believe interoperability between control systems is essential as we move into the IoT age of lighting,” says Ron Steen, VP of NA Specification Sales for Xicato. “Our open API has allowed ETC to harness the benefits of our system in concert with Paradigm and Mosaic.”
Read More about Sue and the ETC installation.
Photos © Field Museum. Photo by Martin Baumgaertner.
Article by Electronic Theater Controls