Most of the innovations on Bond Lane were either after thoughts or there to solve a problem, but using a TV to create a digital and dynamic back scene was the reason for creating the layout.
In theory it seemed pretty straight forward - put the screen at the back of the layout and play a video of a cloudy sky. The reality is that having such a strong light source at the back of the layout means everything in front of it ends up as a silhouette.
If all you wanted to do was have a relatively consistent video playing on the back scene, such as a cloudy sky or city skyline then simply adding some additional lighting above would solve the problem very easily. However, our first experiments were involved playing a few sample videos including a sunset and a lightning storm and the idea of incorporating both of these had fixed itself pretty firmly in our minds.
The very first idea we had worked well and is still incorporated in the final layout. It was relatively simple and surprisingly effective. We took a light sensor from an electronics kit and hid it behind the viaduct so it was next to the TV screen. We then wired this up to some LED strip lighting along with a power source. In this configuration the light sensor acted as a dimmer switch, when the TV screen was bright so were the LED strip lights, and when the screen was darker, the LED strip lights shone less brightly too.
Even now it is not perfect and the lights do not go out entirely, and I suspect experimenting with sensors that have different thresholds would cut the light out completely without compromising the ultimate brightness - but we are happy enough with the results, especially when used in conjunction with some of the other techniques we added (more on that in the next blog post).
So effective is this as a technique that the lights are able to perfectly synchronise so acutely that the LED lights flash perfectly in time with the lightning strikes on the back screen.
As a technique this was a significant breakthrough and allowed us to develop so additional techniques to have control over how different elements of the layout reacted to the video on the back scene relatively easily.
It is also a technique that is pretty inexpensive and accessible without particularly advanced understanding of electronics.
In the next blog post we will look at how we developed another technique to allow us to have control not only over the amount of light on the layout, but also the colour to help really sell a sunset or other scenes.
