7thSense, the multi-award-winning media solutions specialist, has detailed how it has helped a Canadian attraction bring its experience to life.
Found in the centre of downtown Toronto, Little Canada takes visitors on a whistlestop tour of beautiful vistas and iconic landmarks. The highly-detailed miniature attraction features a range of animated cityscapes for visitors to explore, discovering the “little stories” of Canada under one roof in just a few short hours.
There is plenty for tourists to take in at the highly detailed and immersive miniature attraction. Little Canada combines spectacular scenery with enveloping soundscapes, along with the intricate art of moving cars, trains, and boats that operate on a precise 15-minute day cycle.
Once it reaches sunset, minuscule lights in their thousands illuminate the miniature displays. Behind the scenes, the Medialon Showmaster Pro system works to control all of the experiences, unbeknown to guests.
Symphony Interactive was the team coordinating hardware and software custom integration and automation for the attraction.
Its founder and president Howard Bertolo says, “The installation is generally composed of islands of automated miniature attractions, including moving vehicles and trains, and thousands of channels of miniaturised building lighting. This automation was largely handled by custom controllers that the client had designed and fabricated on their own.
“Augmenting these self-contained islands were layers of edge-blended projection video, miniature video, multi-channel audio effects, and scene lighting. In order to converge all these individual pieces into a single, coordinated guest experience, a Medialon show control solution was installed.”
Growing Little Canada
There are currently five destinations that have been shrunk down into bite-size form including Little Golden Horseshoe, Little Niagara, Little Ottawa, Little Toronto and Petit Québec.
A sixth destination is currently under development, named Little North. The Little Bites Café offers guests locally-curated food and drink for the Canadian attraction.
Bertolo concludes: “The AV system was designed by the team at DJ Willrich, who recognised very early on in the project that there was a need for an overall show controller capable of providing tight, synchronised oversight of the entire experience. Medialon was the obvious choice for this.
“Our initial role was only to provide the Medialon programming. The Medialon controller would provide the overall guest experience automation and Unified User Interface (UUI), as well as overall system status, diagnostics and failure reporting.”
“As the scale of the project began to unfold in greater detail, however, the client expanded our role to include services such as technical design consultation, AV coordination, Crestron programming, DSP programming, lighting programming, network design consultation, and even custom designed microcontroller boards for specific set pieces.”
Other companies that have worked on the Little Canada project include Christie and Gateway Ticketing Systems.
Medialon Showmaster Pro is also currently being utilised on the international stage at Expo 2020 Dubai, alongside the Medialon MAS Pro Dante system.
Photos: Little Canada
