● Case study
War Memorial
WALKING THE SITE After a quick chat about the application, the first thing we do is take a walk through the site in order to get a sense of its scale and the challenges it posed the integration team. My grandfather and great uncle fought in the Otago Infantry Brigade in WW1, while Dad flew F4U Corsairs with RNZAF 24 Squadron in the Pacific War, so visiting New Zealand’s National War Memorial was always going to be compelling. Regardless of that personal sense of connection, The Great War Exhibition is a moving experience in its own right, contriving to provoke powerful engagement with raw material. Listening to my recordings later, there were long periods of silence during our tour. Faced with the realism of some displays, I found myself thinking of Kiwi John Lee’s forgotten personal account, Civilian into Soldier, an unflinching barrage of a book that never stops crashing out. Like a film, The Great War Exhibition takes visitors on a temporal journey through vignettes of the great war, beginning in a cobbled street in a Belgian town in pre-war 1914. As you move forward, a military truck morphs into a civilian omnibus seconded as
FOR SECURITY TEAM AND INSTALLERS, MANAGING LOW LIGHT IN THE EXHIBITION SPACE IS A CENTRAL ASPECT OF THE SURVEILLANCE SOLUTION AT THE NATIONAL WAR MEMORIAL AND THEY HANDLE IT WITH DAY/NIGHT CAMERAS AND INTEGRATED IR.
Troop ship
a troop carrier, an exact replica of a Maurice Farman ‘pusher’ biplane with death’s head prow swoops overhead, menacing a gun limber at full gallop. We pass heavy guns, muzzles pointed skyward, loaders bent to their work. Further in, a British Mark I tank launches itself from the lip of a shattered trench, under its tracks life-size German soldiers crouch, teeth bared like cornered animals. We round a corner out of darkness to face 3 stormtroopers dehumanised by gas masks charging the corridor from the open end of a low trench. After getting over the shock I see they are heavily armed – one with a Bergmann MP18 – the world’s first combat submachine gun - another with a flame thrower and the third with a sling of potato masher concussion stielhandgranates. If all this war stuff seems a bit intense, that’s because The Great War Exhibition is intense. Through the powerful agency of its exhibits, battle scenes and near 3-dimensional colourised photography, The Great War Exhibition bursts out of the past into endless moment. There’s a profound connection between the surveillance system and the exhibits themselves that CCTV people will recognise – light. The carefully planned lighting of The Great War Exhibition serves narrative, not identification of visitors. This makes the significant areas of the exhibition the second most challenging CCTV application I’ve ever seen – the first being the lowest levels of the MONA museum in Hobart. For security team and installers, managing low light in the exhibition space is a central aspect of the surveillance solution across the entire National War Memorial and they handle it with day/night cameras and integrated IR. Low light is not the only challenge – there are strong bright points of light from floodlight clusters. Many of the cameras in the darkened sections of the exhibition are simply impossible to photograph – it’s highly unusual for my -3EV DSLR to fail to attain automatic focus but that happens here multiple times. Then there are different colour temperatures in the same area, high and low ceilings, variable angles of view and lines of sight blocked by vehicles and weapons.
THE SYSTEM A range of systems combine to secure the National War Memorial and to protect multiple locations across the precinct. There are cameras around the Carillion and in the Memorial Park along with a camera inside the Dominion Museum building and throughout The Great War Exhibition itself. A remote
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