Case Studies

The Untold Story - Blenheim Palace

For over 30 years Integrated-Circles have been designing and installing specialist audiovisual equipment in Visitor Centres, Museums, exhibitions and corporate presentation facilities around the world. 

This experience, together with their manufacturing and project management expertise, has resulted in them being selected as the system designer and integrator of choice, in many prestigious installations both in the UK and abroad. 

Telling the ‘Untold Story’

Recently, Integrated Circles where responsible for visualising and realising ‘The Untold Story’, a new experience at Blenheim Palace. ‘The Untold Story’ is a timeline exhibition, moving through 12 rooms, that tells the story of the Palace and its many inhabitants from its inception, through to the present day.

The tone of the exhibition, as you would expect, is sophisticated, yet it has a light feel making it accessible to all. The exhibition opened on time and on budget and has been exceptionally well received by both the paying public and critics alike.

Integrated Circles used their great experience and detailed understanding of subtle special effects to realise the story. Using discreetly positioned video imagery as well as sound, light, smells and automated door controls to guide visitors on their journey through the history of Blenheim Palace.

Specially engineered animatronic figures, complete with strategic optical illusions to make them ‘real’, coupled with full-sized ‘ghostly apparitions’, who appear from nowhere to articulate their part in the story, enhance the visitors thrill. Visitors are also able to explore the deeper detail of Blenheim Palace using several interactive touchscreen programs in breakout areas along the route. 

The outline concept had been approved by the end client when Integrated Circles were approached by Sinclair Design Associates to handle the practical implementation of ‘The Untold Story’ turning ‘thoughts’ into ‘reality’. As so often happens, the client already had publicised the opening date of their new exhibition, so with just 14 weeks to build 12 elaborate areas from scratch, it was going to be a close-run thing.

Integrated Circles would have to work fast, without quite enough time to run the project as a linear installation, several large chunks of the task had to be run in parallel and with forceful direction, be made fit together in sequence.

The extremely rigid budget was another familiar constraint. Costs had to be very tightly controlled as there could be no budget overrun as no contingency funding was available. Henry Ford famously said that an engineer is somebody who can do for a dollar, what a fool can do for $10.  It was now time to see if we could verify his maxim.

If you haven't got enough time, you can pay extra and get the job finished.  If you haven't enough money, you can do things slowly and get the job finished.  When you haven't enough time - nor enough money, then you must plan meticulously and ensure you have surrounded yourself with the best people you can get. Therefore the first priority was to get the team together.

Integrated Circles, working with Sinclair Design Associates, selected and assembled the project team.  Initially this consisted of a 3-D designer, a software producer and a scriptwriter. It was extremely important to get the outline script treatment and audiovisual software requirements identified quickly. It was equally important to identify and appoint a set builder who could produce the extremely high quality finishes required and yet be flexible enough to work within the timeframe. The tendering process complete and budgets approved, MDM were appointed to fill this role. Off-site works began immediately under the capable project management of Juliet Carr who worked tirelessly to keep the quality and meet the deadlines.

The constraints of working in an historic family home were many and diverse. The Duke of Bedford, understandably, did not want people with saws, hammers, screwdrivers and paint brushes, tramping around his house at all hours of the day and night.  Similarly, cars, vans and trucks had to be kept to an extremely low profile and were only going to be allowed to offload away from the main building and at specific times. 

The physical access to the exhibition space imposed further constraints. With no lifts, every single piece of the set would have to be physically manhandled up staircases lined with oil paintings.  We were indeed faced with a truly difficult access route to the exhibition.  When it came to it, this part of the installation phase had to be run like a military exercise.

To add to the fiscal and ergonomic constraints, a further, much more demanding, constriction had been placed upon us.

When questioning the client about visitor numbers, it became apparent that they were expecting to process 2,400 people per day through the exhibition.  The exhibition was only to be opened from 10 a.m. until 4 p.m. - 400 people per hour.  This was a rather sobering thought, as this then defined the amount of time available for telling a story in each area.

The normal way of running a timeline exhibition such as this is to always have an empty room between two active rooms full of people.  In order to meet the expected throughput, this technique would be impossible.  People must be moving through the exhibition constantly.  As soon as one room is empty, the next group must enter it.

In order to comply with this constraint, Integrated Circles had to design the exhibition with the absolute minimum of wasted time between rooms. To quickly control the movement of people between two rooms, automatic doors were installed.  This enabled Integrated Circles to get the highest possible throughput of visitors through the exhibition, with the minimum of ‘haste ’ imposed on the visitors.

Every area had to be designed so that Integrated Circles could guarantee that this fast moving throughput would work. They produced a very detailed timing chart that established the activity at every second spent in every room, throughout the 45 minutes it would take people to move through the exhibition.  This chart also established how the rooms would ‘loop’ inside the timeline. This allowed the audiovisual component to be specified to the second and, it was hoped, the production team could match these timings.

The time scale meant that work was still underway on the overall story line whilst the set construction had started.  Decisions had to be made because of the time scale and details added or changed as things developed, a frustrating and demanding circumstance.  Every aspect of the job had to be tightly policed so that a decision made by one part of the team, would not disrupt the work of another.

Integrated Circles had worked out most of the requirements for the ‘visual trickery’ required to bring the storyline to life.  This consisted of some extremely elaborate audio and visual sets that had to be tightly synchronised with custom-made animatronic figures.  Because of the time scale constraints, the visual imagery associated with these figures had to be specified, detailed and filmed whilst the figures were still in production. Designing automated movements that have to exactly emulate the movements of a real actress was very demanding and required close cooperation from everyone involved in the process.

The exhibition also has two virtual image displays, or ‘peppers ghosts’ as they are sometimes erroneously called.  These had to be designed, sightlines checked, mirrors, screens and glass ordered, software parameters specified and the whole display incorporated into the set design.  Detailed drawings had to be prepared, scale models built and finally a full-scale mock-up constructed off-site.

To add to Integrated Circles difficulties, the structure of the building imposed many mechanical constraints that had to be incorporated into the sets.  Steel rods, running from the floor joists, up through the ceiling to the roof structure had to be added to increase the floor loading.  These tie rods had to be installed and ‘lost’ in the sets. In one major area, a complete floating cradle had to be designed and installed to suspend the chandelier in the room below from the rafters in the roof above, without once touching the ceiling or the floor of the room in which Integrated Circles had to install a very demanding optical illusion. This cradle allowed the floor to move minutely as people walked around, whilst affectively isolating the chandelier in the room below, to stop its shimmering as people walked around above it.  Integrated Circles had to design a false floor, with a complete room set including false walls containing the tie rods, while still concealing the projection screen, mirrors and glass around this cradle.  And of course, structural engineers work at their speed not yours.

At every stage of the design process, the end client had to be ‘talked through’ every decision and its effect upon the exhibition.  The challenge to the engineers was to explain this in layman's language so that each set became real to them.  There were many technical problems to be solved.  Such as how do you make the face of an animatronic figure come alive?  To solve this specific problem, Integrated Circles came up with the idea of designing a set so that the unseen face of the figure could be ‘seen’ reflected in a cunningly positioned ‘mirror’. The idea is a small part of the realisation process.  There are mechanical constraints to be overcome, sightlines to be meticulously realised and software to be filmed that must make the illusion work seamlessly in the set.  It must look real and not contrived.  So many disciplines all had to be totally specified and every part of the process had to be carefully monitored and checked.

By now, Integrated Circles’ Technical Director Simon Beer had set up an office on site in an old bathroom.  Having acquired the key to the Palace, he opened up the Palace in the morning and locked up again very late at night.

One of the difficult problems that Beer placed in the hands of MDM’s Juliet Carr was to build artificial walls that exactly simulated the existing stonework of the Palace.  These walls had to both look and feel like the walls of the palace.  The measure of MDM’s success became apparent one evening, when the Palace senior staff got lost whilst walking around the new rooms; they were unable to work out where they were because the recently installed walls were so unbelievably authentic.

In the early stages of the project, Integrated Circles designed the main electrical distribution system.  This is known as an ‘exhibition ring’ which effectively provides the mains supply to the exhibition power sockets, so that the entire display can be turned on and off by one remotely mounted switch.  This has the added advantage that cleaner’s lights can be wired so that when the exhibition ring is active, all the cleaners lights go off, regardless of their switch settings.

As manufacturing company, Integrated Circles used their own off-the-shelf specialist AV control and source equipment for backbone of the exhibition.  Digital SoundStores and digital VideoStores formed the primary source equipment for the sound and video images.  All the equipment is contained in two, 2.2m high racks.  All the lighting is controlled by Integrated Circles IC 903 automatic dimmer packs.

In order to simplify the complex programming requirements, each room is treated as a discreet tableau, using an Integrated Circles EEPROM decoder to synchronise sound, picture, lighting, special effects and control the room entry and exit.  When all the rooms were programmed, another EEPROM decoder was used to lock the rooms together and fulfil the complicated looping routines required.  In this way Integrated Circles were able to realise the extremely tight timing requirements necessary to make the exhibition work.

Integrated Circles also worked closely with the ever patient Blenheim Palace staff and with the various other contractors, timing deliveries from all over the country. Trucks had to be loaded in accordance with a carefully worked out manifest and the timed arrival of the trucks carefully planned.  Specialist contractors had to be identified to provided the labour required for offloading the truck's and moving large pieces of set as well as panes of glass and mirrors through impossibly tight stairwells and corridors.  A vigilantly choreographed offload sequence had to be adhered to in order to avoid blocking an area, where other pieces of set still had to pass. The room sets had been designed so that they could be built off-site, broken down, transported and then reconstituted and installed on-site. To our combined credit, installation was achieved with the minimum of fuss, no nasty surprises and more importantly, no damage to the Palace or the sets.

The exhibition opened on time and on budget and possibly more importantly from Blenheim Palace's point of view, it has proved to be a very reliable, low maintenance installation that has adequately handled the demanding visitor throughput numbers required.