Fancy this: Stone Mountain turning temporarily into a volcano, spewing lava down its side. Then a waterfall pouring down from the top of the world's largest granite outcropping. How about "the Rock" cracking open and birds flying out right at you from its exposed center?
Stone Mountain Park's Lasershow Spectacular, the definition of a really big show since 1983 by virtue of playing on one of the world's biggest screens, will make a huge leap into 21st-century technology this summer.
The state's No. 1 attraction is announcing Monday that its most popular draw is being enhanced with digital, multidimensional projection that adds 3-D-like effects without the glasses.
The Lasershow Spectacular in Mountainvision, as it's being billed, will debut Memorial Day weekend. The old-style Lasershow will open April 1 for spring break, then show on Saturdays until it is permanently put out to pasture at summer's start.
The Lasershow, which each spring and summer pulls in 1 million visitors, has evolved since its last major modernization, for its 25th anniversary in 2008. Many of those guests are returning traditionalists who are happy when the flag-waving, music-filled, fireworks-stoked show remains the same.
Park officials weren't looking to make a major change this year but invested more than $1 million when the new, immersive technology became available.
"It should kick the show up quite a bit," creative director Stan Morrell said. "The technology is there, and of course you want to be ahead [of the curve]. It's not very often you can be in line with the Disneys and places like that."
The technology -- which includes video mapping that allows producers to create a larger and more pristine "screen" out of the mountain and adds full-motion video -- is more readily found in Europe.
Disney World in Orlando introduced a version of it earlier this year on the side of Cinderella Castle. Its nearly 10-minute, twice-nightly show, "The Magic, the Memories and You," is built around snapshots of guests enjoying the park from earlier in the day, but its tricks include birds and flames flying out of the castle.
Stone Mountain's new projection, created by Barco, a Belgian developer and manufacturer of large-screen visualization technology, pushes the trick-the-eye envelope more extensively. Stone Mountain's show, co-produced by Full Spectrum LLC, is adding a 10th "module" (or segment) to showcase its visual razzle-dazzle. The run time will grow from 37 to 42 minutes.
Morrell says each of the returning nine modules will be enhanced to some extent. For instance, in the popular historical module featuring Elvis Presley's "An American Trilogy," artist Augustus Lukeman’s 1925 dense design for the mountain's Confederate carving (later pared down to the trio of Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis and Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson) will come to animated life.
The now antiquated and static PANI slide projection that has driven the show for years maxed out at 200 square feet. Mountainvision will play across a "screen" 400 feet high by 300 feet wide.
Last year, the park completed a $4.1 million restoration of the Memorial Lawn, where as many as 20,000 view the Lasershow Spectacular nightly on the busy July 4th weekend. The addition of Mountainvision is clearly aimed at making the show an even hotter ticket.
"Since it's such a key driver to the park," sales and marketing vice president Sonny Horton said, "it's important for us to offer our current visitors something new and also attract new visitors."
The Spectacular in Mountainvision will remain free with the park's $10 vehicle entrance fee.
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