Due to surprising success and popularity in its debut year, The Power Plant Holiday Light Spectacular was brought back for a second year to Baltimore’s Inner Harbor. The Power Plant, which was completely restored and renovated for retail use in the 80’s and 90’s, originally served as one of Baltimore’s first electricity generating plants for the city’s growing streetcar enterprise. Image Engineering transformed one the city’s oldest and most iconic buildings into a 32,000 square foot canvas of 3D video motion graphics, multi-colored laser effects and choreographed pyrotechnics.

In early 2009, Image Engineering first approached the owners of the century old Power Plant building about using the façade as a backdrop for a larger-than-life video and laser spectacle. Once the light show project was finally funded in October 2011 by local businesses, Image Engineering’s design team immediately went to work creating the sound and light display. The presentation would have to be engaging, artistic, and reliably replayed for over 75 performances from mid-November through New Year’s Eve.

To create the nightly spectacular, the Image team leveraged its entire creative capability to design the multi-faceted show.  Additional resources to develop the video content were provided by another local firm, NVision4D. The integration of video, lasers, lighting, and pyrotechnic effects were all seamlessly choreographed together into one cohesive presentation.

The display relied on a diverse variety of projection technologies. 3D motion graphics projected from six of the brightest video projectors commercially available. Three 20w full-color laser projectors mapped to the building created the laser effect overlays. To improve the show from its 2011 premiere, two of the most powerful white-light laser projectors in the country were deployed to create a multi-colored beam effect. Also added in 2012 were “4D” effects, like snow from strategically placed snow machines along the promenade. A custom built infrastructure was constructed to protect the projection inventory from Baltimore’s unpredictable winter weather and within which to cool the equipment.