The Concept
Since the activation was being featured as part of the GA cup, a highly competitive youth soccer tournament, we knew we wanted to create an experience that not only challenged the amateur athletes to compete against each other, but also compete against a pro athlete at an aspirational level.
To accomplish this, we were inspired by the “ghost laps” often featured in racing video games as a way of replaying the progress of a professional athlete running the course on-demand. To bring that concept into the real world, we built a lighting system that we programmed to replicate the exact timing of the professional running through the pylons on the course.
To make sure the effect would accomplish exactly what we wanted while reducing load-in time, we utilized lighting pre-vizualization software to pre-program all of the lighting effects ahead of time.
Once the rig was built on-site, we brought in our professional athlete and had him run the course. We modified the timings in our lighting system and what resulted was a dynamic lighting effect that would perfectly reflect the time it took the athlete to run through the course. We combined this with our light sensor at the starting line, and the system would automatically trigger the lighting sequence every time an athlete started to run the course.
Laser Trip-Wires, like James Bond? You got it.
It resulted in a system that allowed the athletes to track their progress against the pro athlete in real-time as they ran the course. This was all controlled by our Brand Ambassadors using a custom-designed iPad app. Friendly competition was encouraged by posting the top 10 times of the day on a digital leaderboard.
