Gare de Saint-Jérôme is a heritage railway station located in the historic part of the city of Saint-Jérôme, Quebec. The station is also the starting point of the P'tit-Train-du-Nord park and trail in the Laurentian Mountains. This 200 km bicycle trail was built on a closed Canadian Pacific Railway line that curves around rivers and lakes throughout the mountainside. Designers at the architectural lighting and engineering firm Ombrages conceived a lighting scheme for the station’s outdoor area to underscore this popular tourist attraction. One of the highlights of their design is the river of light that they created using several Rosco X-Effects LED Projectors.
The Ombrages design team wanted a dynamic water effect that would glow in front of the train station at night. Their design objective was to create a lighting landmark for the starting point of the P’Tit Train du Nord trail.
In order to accomplish their goal, the designers specified Rosco X-Effects LED 5500 projectors to create their water effect. Lighting agency LumiGroup provided demo fixtures of the IP65-rated X-Effects projectors for the initial mock-up. The final design called for two-three fixtures to be mounted on each pole that lined the river route. LumiGroup ended up supplying eleven X-Effects, as well as technical support during the installation.
The main challenge of the project was containing the "flowing water" onto the curved path as they created the river of light running past the station. In order to determine the exact placement of the projections, grid gobos were projected onto the path. Photos of the grid projections were then captured from each fixture’s location. Those photos helped determine which X-Effects LED Projector Lens would best fill the path with the streaming water effect.
Rosco's gobo team also used the grid photos to keystone the gobo masks and shape the projection to the pathway. The custom steel mask gobos were then mounted together with cyan-colored Permacolor Dichroic Glass Filters in the same bezel. The final mask gobos were mounted into the static gobo position of the fixture to color and shape the light onto the winding riverbed below.
The pièce de résistance of this installation, however, is the shadowy fish that can be seen floating through the river. The Ombrages designers provided artwork to create “swimming fish” Custom B&W Glass Gobos. These customized X-Effects LED Gobos were combined with the standard textured X-Effects LED glass gobos to create the subtle effect of fish swimming through the river.
In summary, it took three different gobos to create this effect:
To learn more about the products that designers at Ombrages used to create their fish-filled flowing river effect, please explore the X-Effects LED 5500 and Custom Gobo product pages on the Rosco website.
We are pleased to announce that we have launched a new High Output (HO) version of the X-Effects LED that is 50% brighter! X-Effects LED HO projectors are available in both the 5500K and the RGBW models. If you'd like to learn more, visit: www.rosco.com/x-effects
