controlgeek.net Show Control Case Study During Infocomm

Thursday, June 14th, 2012 marks the return of the show control case study session! At this free and open session, we will have presentations on three interesting show control systems: a museum in the Netherlands, a themed retail installation in the northeast, and an academic themed attraction in NYC.

Schedule:

6pm: Amsterdam Maritime Museum (Het Scheepvaartmuseum)

Presented by Sierk and Sander Janszen, Rapenburg Plaza

The Amsterdam Maritime Museum consists of themed exhibitions and interactive exhibits. Rapenburg Plaza was responsible for the complete media and lighting control, the major part of the audio-visual installations and also the entire technical content, including the lighting design for the Voyage at Sea – an impressive maritime experience. The system was built using Medialon software, KissBox interfaces and industrial network hardware and software. The system allows the personnel complete control over all lighting and AV equipment, however Rapenburg Plaza programmers can also manage and monitor the entire installation remotely.

6:30pm: Jordan's Furniture "Splash" Fountain Show

Presented by Jason Rowley JMD & Associates, Inc. and Kevin A Zevchik, Zanim8tion

Jordan's Furniture commissioned a show to run daily in their Warwick, Rhode Island location. It features fountains, surround sound, lighting and lasers, all controlled using Zanim8tion and AV Stumpfl hardware and software.

7pm: Gravesend Inn

Presented by John Huntington, Professor, NYC College of Technology/City Tech

The Gravesend Inn is a high-tech, interactive, audience-driven haunted hotel attraction, which has been staged in Brooklyn by New York City College of Technology’s Entertainment Technology department for more than 10 years, with a typical attendance of about 2000 people. In 2011, for the first time, all the control, video playback, video surveillance, and audio distribution was run over a distributed, managed Ethernet network with multiple VLAN's and inter-VLAN routing. Medialon Manager is the show control system and communicates to all but one device in the entire attraction over IP and Ethernet.

7:30pm: Open Geekout!
Open time--anyone can present on any show control-related topic for 5-10 minutes.  First come, first served.

9pm:A controlgeek.net geekout, involving (most likely) go karts and alcohol; location/details to be announced.

Thanks to the generosity of Kevin Ruud, we will be meeting in the Kelley Technologies Boardroom, which is located at 5625 Arville Street, Suite E, Las Vegas, NV 89118-2280 (google map here). We will likely chip in and order in some food.  I'll post any updates on the day of the event on twitter.

I hope to see you there!

Storm Chase Video

I rough edited some of my video from the first part of my trip.  This video starts in Minnesota (photos and more details here), moves into Nebraska, Iowa, Kansas, Texas, and ends in Alabama.  The parts without sound are sped up to show the storm motion.

Surprise Storm Chase in Mississippi and Alabama

I was on my way from San Antonio yesterday towards Asheville, and decided to take a look at the Gulf near Gulfport, MS.  I wasn't really expecting to chase storms so I didn't have all my stuff setup, but I was watching on Radarscope.  I stuck my toe in the gulf and then saw storms go severe north of me.   There's a lot of tall forests in this area so I wasn't figuring to chase them, but then the emergency alert broadcast cut into the radio station with a tornado warning, so I figured I'd go for it  I got stuck in traffic in Gulfport and missed the first storm, but I did see another forming up near Wiggins, Mississippi:

(That's not a tornado but it sure was trying!)

And I chased this through the trees to near Citronelle, Alabama, where I found a clearing in the pine forest:

Here it had formed into a weak supercell--that tubular cloud from left to right is inflow into the weakly rotating, severe-warned storm:

According to spotter network, I was the only person on this storm, so I got to file my first two spotter reports!  More photos here.

Weather Resources for Show Crews Article in Protocol

The article I wrote for Protocol, the journal of PLASA, is now out in print and available online here.  You can also download a PDF if you'd like.  In the article I describe weather monitoring resources for crews working on outdoor shows.

Texas Severe Thunderstorm

Headed down from Dallas and got on a severe-warned storm near Cuero, Texas:

There's so little severe potential for the next week that even the Weather Channel is suspending their "Great Tornado Hunt", so I'm going to take some time off the chase too...

Kansas Severe Thunderstorm

Yesterday I chased the first thing to pop in a severe thunderstorm watch area and was able to chase a storm near Cottonwood Falls, Kansas from an intense updraft to the south of an existing non-severe thunderstorm (video at some point when I get caught up):

Into a severe-warned monster:

The storm morphed into a massive rain system that raged all night, losing strength following me all the way to northeastern Oklahoma.  It's still moving east as I write this now...  More pictures here.

This storm system made up for Saturday's bust, where I (and about 100 other chasers) sat under a tornado watch most of the day; the storms didn't fire until probably 3am shortly after I got to bed, and long after the tornado watch was cancelled.  I did shoot a few photos around Osmond, Nebraska, and got the supermoon too:

More photos here.

More Chasing in Nebraska and Iowa

Thursday was a bust--didn't see a single storm.  But I hung out near Beatrice, Nebraska for a while, hoping storms would fire:

Eventually I drove around some back roads looking for photos, and found this one:

I stayed in Omaha and then the next morning took my time driving up through Iowa, and stumbled across some crazy flood damage from last year, near Missouri Valley at the Boyer Chute wildlife refuge:

That's just silt out to the horizon. The water got pretty high:

I got to Sioux City, and then a severe storm fired to the northeast but I was stuck in a Friday afternoon slowpoke traffic jam.  I did eventually get on the storm:

I spotted this lowering:

The same storm system produced a couple tornados out to the east but it was moving too fast for me to get in front of them.  I saw another cell firing down in eastern Nebraska, so headed down to check that out.  It created several severe storms and then collapsed.  But I did see a beaver (my first one ever!) in the Missouri river, near Little Sioux:

I caught a nice sunset:

And behind my hotel, there was a nice lightning show from a severe storm in the distance:

Tornadic Storms in Southern Nebraska

I came down from Sioux Falls, SD to southern Nebraska yesterday.  So little was happening during the day that I got my oil changed in Norfolk Nebraska.  The storms finally fired up right before sunset, and two cells exploded through the cap about an hour before sunset.  This one was near Fullerton, Nebraska:

Another cell was exploding to the south:

I got a few shots:

And then I figured I'd grab some food, shoot some lightning photos, and head back to Council Bluffs, where I had booked a room:

Right after I shot that photo above, the storm formed a tornado down over Shickley.  Unfortunately, I was to the north and there was a wall of hail and severe winds between me and the tornado, so I had to drive way around it to the West.  By the time I got down there, the storm had become tornado warned and unwarned about three times.  I did see what looked like a wall cloud forming:

I moved north and then stopped to shoot a couple more photos:

I was planning to shoot north between the storms and head back, but I stayed a bit too long and the storm, though no longer tornadic, sped up, became a wall of east bound golf-balls sized hail that chased me all the way back.  It finally lost its severe warning as I pulled into Council Bluffs at about 2am.  At that point, I had been chasing (or chased by) this same storm since it became a blip on the radar at about 6pm.  More photos (and radar screen captures) here.

Severe-Warned Storm In Southern Minnesota

For a few days I've been heading out from NYC to the midwest for storm chasing, and this afternoon I got onto a severe warned storm east of Slayton, Minnesota.  The same system dropped a couple tornadoes about 100 miles to the north, but I couldn't get up there in time.  Here's a few photos:

 

 Watching the radar carefully I stayed out of the hail and heavy rain...  More photos here; I'm updating twitter if you're interested...

St. Louis Tent Collapse--Will We Ever Learn?

Once again: temporary structure--severe thunderstorm warning--bow echo, and again, a fatal structure collapse: