Source: “A Fresco from the small royal tomb at Vergina, 340 BC, Macedonia, Greece.”
Title: Persephone and Hades
Light Show for the Pausch Bridge, Spring 2021
CMU Interdisciplinary Team
- Juhi Agrawal – BS Computer Science
- Jonathan Loungani – BS Computer Science
- Vera Schulz – MS Integrated Innovation for Products and Services
- Michelle Yue – BS Electrical & Computer Engineering
- Nicole Yu – BS Design
Introduction to Our Project:
“Working in cross-disciplinary teams, students will explore light as art, interactive design, and programming using a Pharos lighting control system. Students will explore the use of light and interaction using the actual controls within the Randy Pausch Memorial Bridge. Student teams will develop final projects that will be exhibited on the Randy Pausch Memorial Bridge.” [Source: Syllabus 15/62-661]
Our short mission: We wanted to create a project that represented our school backgrounds, identities, and interests which is how we chose the story of Persephone and Hades. We appreciated the different and complex interpretations of the story and found it the ideal creative avenue to use to create a bridge installation – due to the story’s timelines and its dramatic themes.
Main Tools Utilized:
|Figma – For Brainstorming and Visual Conceptualization | Google Slides – For Presentations and Critiques |Pharos Lighting Control System – For the light installation|
Premise
Our show follows the Greek legend of Persephone and Hades.
At its core, the story is an explanation for the seasons. Hades, god of the underworld, falls in love with the goddess Persephone and kidnaps her. While in the underworld, Persephone eats the seeds of a pomegranate, which prevent her from being able to return to the surface. Her mother, Demeter is devastated by the loss of her daughter and prevents crops from growing in her grief. Finally, Zeus, king of the gods, works out a compromise in which Persephone will return to her mother for a portion of the year, and spend the remainder with Hades. And so the reunion of Persephone with Demeter each year marks the beginning of Spring, while her departure brings Winter.
Being a myth, the story has many slight variations in how the events are presented, and our group was drawn to versions of the story where Persephone embraced her role as queen of the underworld, rather than simply being a damsel in distress. In the show, we focus on Persephone’s growth from innocence to maturity, driven by her struggle as she is torn between two worlds.
Planning:
Before diving into creating our actual show, we began by brainstorming colors and schemes to represent the different characters and settings for our show. Below, are a few examples of mood boards where we used reference images in order to create a color palette for our settings and characters.
The most important aspect of selecting colors was assigning them to our main characters. We settled on the following colors to represent our main characters:
- Persephone: Purple
- Hades: Blue
- Demeter: Gold
Additionally, for our characters Zeus and Hermes we decided to use whites, golds, oranges, and reds and rely on the movement of light to depict their existence and actions, rather than just a solid color.
Part One: The Garden
Our show begins with a slow-paced depiction of a garden, represented by a bright green background with light blue and light pink panels, or “flowers”, slowly blooming in and out of the scene. The gates end of the bridge has blue and white flickers, simulating water in a pond. The blooming stops and a purple streak slowly moves back and forth across the bridge, depicting Persephone strolling through the garden and enjoying the flowers. Eventually, she stops at a dark blue flower and an orange-red fiery flicker effect spreads out from where Persephone and the blue flower are. The blue flower is meant to represent the presence of Hades, and when Persephone stops at this flower, she is kidnapped and the scene takes a rapid change to the fast-paced Underworld.
Part Two: The Underworld
We transition into a scene depicting the Underworld and chose to emphasize the relationship between Hades and Persephone. After introducing the setting through the most commonly known symbol of the Underworld, fire, we go through several fast-paced scenes of interwoven pinks, purples, and blues dancing across the bridge. The shade of purple darkens throughout this scene, representing the growing maturity of Persephone as she interacts with Hades and the Underworld. Alternatively, the shade of blue lightens as Hades grows softer through his interactions with Persephone.
Part Three: The Drought
There is once again a shift in pace as we transition to the state of the Earth in the absence of Persephone. In contrast to the fast pace of the Underworld, the drought scene is still and devoid of bright colors. The previous garden scene is replicated but this time, all of the colors are desaturated and the barely visible flowers slowly disappear. This scene emphasizes the despair of Demeter as all life on Earth seemingly disappears.
Part Four: The Deal
The next scene for our show is when Zeus sends Hermes down to the Underworld to retrieve Persephone in order to stop Demeter’s drought. Zeus and Hermes are depicted in Olympus, within the clouds. As Zeus tells Hermes to travel to the Underworld, they exchange colors a number of times to represent their interaction. Hermès then descends to the Underworld shown on the Gates side of the bridge, while the clouds of Olympus fade away and the bridge transitions to the flickering footprints of Hermes.
Part Five: The Pomegranate
The bridge is split in half to show the underworld and overworld side-by-side. On opposite extremes of the bridge, Demeter and Hades both reach out for Persephone who flushes between dark and light shades of purples as she feels torn between the two worlds.
Persephone finally reaches out to Demeter and begins ascending from the underworld. But separating them is a red pomegranate. Persephone flickers with darkness as she thinks of Hades and her life in the underworld, and she decides to consume the pomegranate seeds, knowing that they will compel her to remain in the underworld. Darkness rushes in as she falls back to the Underworld and reunites with Hades. However, because she ate only six of the pomegranate seeds, she is able to return to the surface for half of the year.
Part Six: Seasons
Seasons Part One:
In order to show the pattern of how Persephone’s arrival to Earth brings spring and her departure brings winter, we created a setting where the Gates end of the bridge represents the Underworld and the rest of the bridge represents Earth. Persephone is shown exiting the Underworld and making her way across Earth, transforming the drought into the bright green garden scene shown earlier. She is then shown returning to the Underworld and leaves behind a scene of icy colors. This pattern is repeated twice in order to show the circularity and repetitive nature of the seasons.
Seasons Part Two: In this part, we show the cyclical nature of the seasons as we know it now.
We start off in winter, where it’s cold, but despite that, Hades and Persephone are enjoying the time they have together before spring comes. The bright green wave background behind them is the aurora borealis, a fair representation of their passion despite it being winter, something that is usually correlated with bleakness.
As the wave of pink comes, representing spring, we see Hades disappear, and Persephone chases after him, not wanting it to end. Demeter (golden yellow) then comes in and comforts her, and reminds her that she isn’t alone, and they walk off the “stage” together. Persephone is the goddess of spring, so we wanted to showcase her powers with a gradient of pink and purple, representing flowers. In the middle of spring, a bit of Hades calls out in the distance, and Persephone once again misses him, causing it to rain (April showers).
Summer comes in to comfort, and we see Persephone and Dementer enjoying their time together in the sun. They walk on “stage” together and then start weaving around each other, showing a more playful nature and a healthy mother-daughter relationship. In the background, we can see the leaves slowly change into autumn colors.
Autumn comes in with a flickering effect, acting as leaves falling. Persephone and Demeter depart, and Hades and Persephone reunite. This celebration is shown through them weaving together. The bridge then lights up with their colors, showing a happy ending.
Reflection and Recommendations:
Our team ran one trial show before the final presentation on last Thursday May 6th. In this trial run, we realized that darker colors do not lend themselves well to creating a compelling light show due to the fact that the luminosity is not strong or vibrant enough to be seen. Due to this our team brightened the spectrum of colors we decided to use –so that the colors could be seen up close and from afar.
In our final show our colors and transitions were dazzling and bright, showcasing the story of Hades and Persephone and how they evolved and how ultimately our season came into existence. We did notice that certain parts of the show could have been a bit brighter but we were satisfied with the results.
Some recommendations we would give anyone programming the bridge is to:
- Choose bright colors that show up on the bridge
- Test the color show multiple time and from various viewpoints and angles of the bridge
- Utilize Pharos creatively and always push for the most innovative display.
- Have a cohesive story from end to finish – most people who will see your bridge installation will most likely not understand the context -so it is important to have some color story or drama in your performance that captivate the viewer.
Thank you to:
- All our teammates
- Dr. Garth Zeglin and Professor Cindy Limauro
- Our classmates of 15/62-661
- The camera and picture crew
- Our online and in-person audience members who attended the show
For all your support and help and making this mini memorable and possible!