Imagine hosting a $12 million show stretched across 5 city blocks, entertaining hundreds of thousands of visitors every season, with a few little limitations:

No wires
No cables
No antennas
No signs
No storage on site
No permanent stage
No permanent lights
No permanent anything

How do the images work?
Lights of Liberty isn't a movie or a video or, as many people guess, computer animation. It starts with one of the most ancient media of all: paintings. Most of the images are original acrylic artworks, all researched from 18th Century drawings, prints and cartoons and all created entirely by hand. Layers and layers of paint help give the effect of dimension, and elaborate pieces can take several weeks to finish. The British battle scene is a little different. You're looking at costumed re-enactors fighting an authentic battle, which the crew shot on 35 mm film. At the Show site, images are projected with 16 special 1,000 watt projectors, made in Austria and France. They enlarge the original artwork 1000% or more. (Imagine a 3 foot painting blown up to 30 feet, about three stories, high.) Sometimes pieces of the images are masked to give the illusion of depth and motion. And that's just the visual part of things.

Send your ears back in time.
The sound is digital, of course. It's also binaural, which means "enters your brains the same way sound from your two ears does, and sounds extremely cool." This gives it a real-life quality to the sound, so realistic it's almost scary. Boom. You hear cannons far in the distance. You also hear a carriage creaking to your left, a whispered conversation to your right. Underneath all the sound effects is the music, a film-quality soundtrack performed by members of the Philadelphia Orchestra.