Gautam Rangan - Project Jewel Light Shows

animation content by myself, photo by David Sanders

This 1 minute clip highlights my process for developing a visual language and creating content for the evening shows at Jewel in the Changi Airport in Singapore as Director of Immersive Media at WET Design. You can see glimpses of the mockups that took place from 2015 to 2019 at WET in Los Angeles. A lot of effort was required to understand the unique and unpredictable ways that water and fog carry projection. For example each water droplet is like a little prism that splits light into a rainbow, so the color changes as you move. The water and fog also visualize the projection beam, creating volumes from 2D images.

Like Hadrian’s Pantheon, which creates a portal for light to enter space in a theatrical way, the shows at Jewel dramatize and respond to the elements. The shows reference structures like Brunelleschi’s Duomo and Trajan’s column, telling a story from all directions at once. They also recall architect Toyo Ito’s project “Tower of Winds,” using projected light to connect an abstract, semiotic understanding of dense urban space with the physical.

I would like to thank some people and teams who have been critical to this process: everyone at WET Design and Mark Fuller for facilitating this level of creative exploration, Jim Doyle for his creative genius, coming up with the crazy idea to project on the waterfall and guiding the design of the projection system, Jaron Lubin and Charu Kokate of Safdie Architects, Ashith Alva and Changi Airport team for their encouragement and trust, Howard Tsai for helping to pitch this concept and continued input, Peter Kopik for pushing the project further, Ting Zhang and Lachlan Turczan for their amazing brains and creative/emotional support, Eric Ludacer and Christie Digital for 24/7 support including last-minute emergency parts replacement :). Jose Aleman for his tireless ingenuity and problem solving, Steven Burkholder for engineering the network and supporting it throughout the night.

5 minutes of fame on National Geographic

A short montage of some of my choreography work including moments from three different shows.

animation content by myself, photo by David Sanders

Drone footage of the 1/5 scale mock-up (10 foot diameter outer rain circle) taken by David Sanders and Howard Tsai. Edited by Howard Tsai. Here you can see some of Howard's projection work as well as my own.

Awesome documentation of the mock-up at Hansen Dam by David Sanders and Lachlan Turczan, edited by Lachlan Turczan. Again a mix of Howard and my projection work.

On the left you can see a 2-dimensional animation I made, and on the right is a recording of the projection slicing through the circle of falling water. As you can see a line becomes a circle as it projects through the cylinder of water. The song is Family Portrait by the band Rachel's. This is only one hypothetical orientation of projector and water - I'm interested to play around with more complex arrangements and multiple projectors.

This is a song called Systems and Layers also by the band Rachel's. The patterns I made here are an abstract reference to the structural lattice work of the building (an airport) and kite strings.

This video shows the projection on a single sheet of water with fog. The way falling water interacts with projection is interesting - it changes 2-dimensional imagery into volumetric forms, and the shifting fog abstracts the shapes. Furthermore, while you can't see it in this video, each water droplet functions like a tiny prism, so the color shifts slightly as you move your head.