Application Spotlight: Bringing Dinosaurs Back to Life
Coloredge New York * Los Angeles recently completed the graphics for Dinosaur Hall at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County.
On Friday, July 16th, the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County opened its all-new 14,000 square-foot Dinosaur Hall. The exhibit, featuring more than 300 fossils and 20 complete mounts of dinosaurs and sea creatures, rivals the world’s leading dinosaur halls for the number of individual fossils displayed.
Lexington Scenery sought out Coloredge New York * Los Angeles to produce and install the graphics for this project. John Gibson, the Coloredge account executive, along with Howard Smith, the Lexington project manager and Jennifer Morgan, the museum’s project manager, worked together over a three month period. The team collaborated to ensure that all aspects of the graphic elements were impactful, but that they also met the technical requirements needed for being on display with fragile exhibit artifacts.
Adorning the main exhibit hall, the majority of the graphics were wall coverings printed on Ultraflex matte wallpaper and output on a Durst Rho 500r printer. The wallpaper material was double cut which allows for a butt seam, as opposed to imaging adhesive back vinyl where you must overlap the seams. The largest individual wallpaper graphic depicting a Mamenchisaurus, is 60 feet long by 20 feet high. Coloredge NY * LA worked with Ace Wallcovering to install more than 5,000 square feet of wallpaper material for this project.
The display case graphics were printed on matte photographic material using Coloredge’s Lightjet device at sizes up to 6x10-feet. These prints were wrapped around specially treated wood material supplied by Lexington specifically for this project. The panels needed to be specially treated so that they wouldn’t “gas off” and damage the 60 million year-old artifacts.
For the artifacts encased in glass, Coloredge looked to their prototyping division, Comp24. The Comp24 team utilized a special transfer process to apply five-color transfers to glass as large as five by 11 feet and up to ½-inch thick. An opacity layer was printed on its EFI VUTEk GS3200 onto Avery Ultra Clear 103 material. Using a wet mount process, this opacity layer was then applied to the Comp24 transfers for added definition.
An additional element of the project utilized 3M 8660 material with 3645 interior Floor minder for a graphic 12 by 12 feet. After installing the floor graphic, the print was treated with a clear wax allowing maintenance crews to remove scuff marks, a process recommended by 3M.
This project received high marks from the SGIA during its 2011 Expo in New Orleans. Coloredge New York - Los Angeles was recognized in the Association’s Golden Image Competition with a win in the digital graphics-building graphics category.
