Wonderful World of Oliver Jeffers, Discover, UK

The Wonderful World of Oliver Jeffers’ was a temporary exhibition at Discover Children’s Story Centre, London that Michael Grubb Studio supported the lighting design.

With a limited budget, this presented the greatest challenge to create an immersive experience that reflected the joy of the books.

The Discover Children’s Story Centre had a huge variety of economic stage and disco lighting equipment, which was Michael Grubb Studio’s starting point.

We decided to create a short-animated film that combined various illustrations from the books and projected on to the main wall. Within the animation file we created a hidden ‘lighting control desk’ which was used to control the lighting. This consisted of a series of coloured bars that outputted the RGB values to the DMX RGB luminaries and controlled the levels of the tungsten par cans.

This lo-fi approach meant that our control system was essentially a movie file, which was extremely dynamic and synchronized with the audio and video. It was also extremely straightforward for staff to use.