Colombia's Bicentennial Overtakes Bogota's Downtown With Adamson

On July 20, over 30,000 people rammed into Plaza de Bolivar, a downtown square surrounded by historic local and federal government buildings, for a 360° audio visual experience lit up by 390,000 lumen of projection mapping, and 100 Adamson line array enclosures hidden between and within buildings.

The Square has great historical meaning as it has been the stage for many violent struggles in Colombia's history, including where the first Call for Independence took place exactly 200 years earlier.

The facades of all the surrounding buildings were incorporated to the show.  Within the columned National Capitol and Justice Palace buildings, musicians and dancers depicted a scene of the struggles and war between the natives and the Spanish conquistadores, with real horses in body armour being incorporated into the show. There were staged people on the roofs, and the Primate Cathedral was used to suspend an acrobat using wires, as she performed aerial acrobatics carrying the Colombian flag to a song called ‘La Esperanza’ or ‘Hope’. The long colonial style Lievano building's side was used to close the show with a massive 20 minute projection show celebrating Colombia, before the night sky exploded with a million fireworks.

The 3D mapping show content created by Diorama with a section by Brash 3D, began with an homage to Colombia's landscape, canvassing imagery of the rainforest's bounty of flora and fauna matched with ethereal music with a  jungle like drum beat, followed by cityscapes and more abstract ideas. Drums, flutes, and guitars bridged the show's development into more contemporary imagery including street art. Bogota-based Sonic Design executed the technical design for the entire show including the 3D mapping, produced countless 3D models, 2D drawings, renders, sound designs and lighting simulations to achieve the end result. 

An exclusively Adamson speaker line-up was used. 48 Y18, 16 Y10s, 16 SpekTrix and 16 T21Subs for a punchy bottom end were mostly hidden inside and within buildings to camouflage them at night, all the arrays were zoned so they could be turned on in different parts of the show and not to produce harmful interaction between them. Leonardo Vilar of Sonic design explained: "I placed sound on the left and the right buildings around the square. The show started on the right building and all sound at this point came from this side for the entire plaza.  The second part of the show was on the left building and here again, the sound came only from this side.

“What was really interesting was the 3D mapping show, which was staged in the middle building and I could not place any loudspeakers in front of it. The solution was to use both left and right arrays to provide sound, but I only used the bottom of all the arrays, so I would not get harmful interaction among all of them. It worked out great, sounded really cool and allowed me to provide sound to the entire plaza without the speaker arrays contaminating the aesthetics of the show.”

Amplification was provided by Lab.gruppen fP6400s, controllers by XTA 448s, and consoles used at FOH were all digital, and included C.Vilar's brand new DiGiCo SD8, Digidesign Control 24, Yamaha's PM5D and LS-9.

The show was produced by Festival Iberoamericano de Teatro, Areavisual, and Sonic Design. All live audio equipment and personnel was provided by C.Vilar in addition some lights, which were augmented by Dussan, Chamorro, and moving lights. All video servers and projection was provided by Sonic Design. Fireworks were provided by Monarca Shows.

This critically acclaimed televised event was attended by Colombian President Alvaro Uribe, and Bogota's Mayor Samuel Moreno, and recorded live for a future DVD release.

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