Welcome to the Bond Lane blog.
Over the next few months we are going to make a few posts about the layout and some of the things that are a bit different.
Most of the innovations on Bond Lane were born out of necessity. The digital back scene came about because we didn't have the artistic ability to paint it by hand, the ability to adjust the height came from the benefit of viewing the layout from eye level, the folding mechanism was devised so it could fit in our car and then the different ways light is controlled came from the problems introduced by the digital back scene.
In fact, so many of the defining things about Bond Lane were beyond our control. The final dimensions were dictated to us, the length and height by the size of the TV screen and the depth by the radius of Peco 009 set track. The layout of the scene was born out of the Metcalfe buildings we had rescued from a previous layout we had produced, and the size of the off screen elements were restricted by the fact that the folding sections had to be no longer than the length of the main section.
In some ways this made it easier, because this took away some of the decision making process normally involved in a new layout - which is a good job because when we set out we had no idea how many challenges were ahead of us.
The biggest challenge was that this was unchartered territory. We found absolutely zero articles on the internet or in magazines that offered any help as to how to incorporate a screen into a layout. I suspect this is because, as it turned out, this is an incredibly difficult thing to do.
It sounds simple - put a telly at the back, put a video of some clouds on it and job done. However, having such a strong light source at the back of the layout meant everything else was just a silhouette - so what followed was months of trying to find ways to introduce additional light to the layout that could be perfectly synchronised with whatever video was playing. In the end we have a number of different things going on to make this work, and our hope is that we can share these with you through these various blog articles.
Inspiration for the solutions came from a range of sources. From the movie industry we learned from both special effects techniques and the technology used in cinema's themselves to enhance the viewing exprience. We are also huge fans of the 'Catalunya' layout by Shirley and David Rowe that is on show at Pecorama.
We also owe a huge debt to Dan Evason from Tunnel Lane Model Railways as he helped us with the scenery elements and some of the final construction to get it ready for exhibition.
For those expecting to read about the use of a Raspberry Pi / Arduiono to control the layout, I am afraid you will be disappointed. There is no 'computer brain' involved with Bond Lane, although we do rely heavily on a laptop to play the video and this is key to one of the main secrets of how to get the lighting and video in sync, but there is no coding of any sort involved.
In the next article we will look at how and why we set about making sure the layout could be adjustable to any height we needed while at an exhibition - and some of the unexpected issues that it has caused.
