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STEAM Studio Brings Holiday Cheer

STEAM Studio At UNC Asheville Presents A New Musical Animatronic Installation at NC Arboretum’s 2022 Winter Lights

By UNC Asheville

December 1^st, 2022

View “Story Time at Woodland Cove” From November 18 to December 31, 2022

This holiday season, the North Carolina Arboretum is featuring a brand new musical display imagined and engineered by UNC Asheville’s STEAM Studio faculty and students . The exhibit, helmed by the Director of STEAM Studio Sara Sanders and Design Specialist Chas Llewelyn, brings together six animatronic woodland animals native to Western North Carolina in holiday song. This newest exhibit at Winter Lights at the North Carolina Arboretum was researched, designed, built, coded, and brought to life by members of the STEAM Studio faculty and UNC Asheville student engineers.

“The Animatronics project started out as an engineering senior design capstone class,” explained Sanders. “The Arboretum first approached Chas Llewelyn, an alum of our New Media Department, because of his wonderful portfolio of puppets. We decided it would be a great opportunity for our engineering students to get engaged.”

STEAM Studio Brings Holiday Cheer

Curated for the NC Arboretum’s Winter Lights seasonal event, the animatronics began as a reimagined elk displayed in the 2021 walk-through holiday light show. This year, a troupe of furry friends of all sizes have arrived to join him in song, including a small squirrel that leaps and bounds across his rock and a friendly black bear.

“All of the animals are to-scale,” said engineering student Matthew Taboada. “To design all of the mechanisms and to lift and control the weight of the movements was a really cool challenge. The elk has these big antlers, which are super heavy, and it [moves] its gigantic head and neck around. He has a lot of complexities that are worth checking out.”

STEAM Studio Brings Holiday Cheer

The animals that the STEAM studio made include the elk—who will lead the rest of the animals through songs—a black bear, a bobcat, a raccoon, a goose, and the squirrel. Each of the animals, as commissioned by NC Arboretum, had to have elements of their real-life movements to make the animatronics believable. To begin, student workers first combed through videos and researched how a goose might flap its wings or how a bobcat swishes its tail. Combining all the minutiae of movements, the team then had to design the bodies and extremities from scratch.

“A major step was thinking about how the movements actually work in the animal,” said Sanders. “How do the muscles and the bone work together to make that movement, and how can we translate that to a mechanical system using motors and actuators? What’s going to hold all that stuff together? What’s going to be the frame? What computer or microprocessor will control it? And then synthesizing that information into what you see.”

STEAM Studio Brings Holiday Cheer

“To design all of the mechanisms and to lift and control the weight of the movements was a really cool challenge.”

Along with the mathematics and science that went into creating these animals, a great deal of creativity was involved as well. Casey Watkins, the costume designer for the department of Drama at UNC Asheville, was heavily consulted regarding the actual fur that encompassed the metal skeletons. Watkins helped source and tailor the material to fit snugly around the electronics and foam.

At the core of STEAM Studio is the curricular intersection of science, technology, engineering, art, and math. Students from these departments and disciplines utilize the tools and equipment housed in the studio to realize cross disciplinary and collaborative solutions to real world problems. The Animatronics project wouldn’t have been possible without the community that STEAM has created, where creativity, logic, and imagination are just as important as knowing how to use a jigsaw or a drill press.

Holiday revelers are invited to view UNC Asheville’s STEAM Studio holiday animatronics exhibit at NC Arboretum’s Winter Lights show from November 18 to December 31. For more information, visit ncarboretum.org/winter-lights/.

Footnotes

Sawyer Serdula ‘23

FootNotes

Sawyer Serdula ‘23

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