The world’s largest indoor theme park - Warner Bros. World Abu Dhabi - has recently opened in the United Arab Emirates. Featuring six immersive lands and state-of-the-art attractions across 153,000 square meters, the park brings together iconic characters from DC Entertainment, Hanna-Barbera and Looney Tunes all in one place. Thinkwell, an LA-based design and production agency, conceived and designed the park in collaboration with Warner Bros. and its development partners at Miral. Their spectacular lighting design used nearly 300 Rosco Cube LED Fixtures that were integrated into the architectural elements and attractions throughout the park to create fully immersive environments for visitors.
Nick Davidson, Senior Lighting Designer at Thinkwell, used all three Rosco Miro Cube LED fixtures – the tunable white light WNC, the RGBW color-mixing 4C and the UV365 black light – to illuminate a number of different applications and areas across the park. “I’ve had a lot of success with Rosco Cubes in the past,” he shared having used them in various theatre, dance, and permanent install museum applications. This prior experience encouraged Nick to specify Miro Cubes for accent and special effects lighting in several of the park’s attractions.
Davidson reported that he integrated Miro Cube 4C and WNC fixtures as architectural accent lights in several area development and attraction queue areas throughout the indoor theme park. As visitors wait to enter the Justice League: Warworld Attacks attraction, for example, they’ll see the white light from the Miro Cube WNC fixtures uplighting the columns in front of the large faux-window.
Once inside the attractions, Davidson primarily used the Miro Cube 4C & UV365 fixtures to create color and black light effects. For example, he installed nearly 120 of the Miro Cube UV365 units inside the Tom & Jerry: Swiss Cheese Spin attraction to pop on and illuminate fluorescent scenery and character images in the ride. In an article about Warner Bros. World Abu Dhabi for LSI online magazine, Davidson stated that “the Miro Cube is a remarkable, compact UV wash light with a native 10º beam spread. The scenery for Tom and Jerry: Swiss Cheese Spin, our black light indoor rollercoaster, was lit entirely with these – as they are perfect for long throw applications.”
Davidson explained to us that “the native very narrow optics of the fixtures made it the perfect choice for the long throw from the catwalk positions, while keeping the punch we needed to make the scenery really vibrant against the surrounding darkness.” He utilized those same features of the Miro Cube UV365 in other areas of the park, including the dark ride attraction Ani-Mayhem.
Nick often employed the Miro Cube 4C fixtures to backlight windows and provide key light inside show window boxes. Because of their compact size, Davidson was able to hide the 4” cube fixtures inside scenic elements to bathe various scenic elements in colored light. “The biggest selling point of the 4C for me has always been the deep blue color range available in the fixture’s Osram quad chip, which is something you don’t often find in other compact RGBW fixtures.” A perfect example can be found inside the Justice League: Warworld Attacks ride. Davidson hid a single Miro Cube 4C on the floor, behind an overturned police car. That one fixture washed an entire building façade in that deep blue color he likes so much. The riders never saw the light fixture, but they definitely experienced its vivid color.
Besides their compact size and vibrant light output, Davidson also appreciated the set of beam spread lenses that shipped with each fixture. “The changeable optics make the Miro Cubes very versatile and useful,” he commented, “particularly in theme park and attraction environments where there is frequently a need to adapt to evolving scenery and lighting positions throughout production.”
If you’re planning a vacation to the UAE, definitely keep Warner Bros. World Abu Dhabi on your itinerary. Visit their website - www.wbworldabudhabi.com – to learn more and find out why they were awarded with the 2019 Theme Park Insider Award for Best Theme Park.
For more information about the fixtures Nick Davidson used inside Warner Bros. World Abu Dhabi, explore the Cube Family product page on the Rosco website.
