Ive just, today, in fact around 2 hours ago decided to start splitting down these blog posts in to a more sensible format. Rather than going through what has happened chronologically and trying to cram everything into one catchup post I’m doing them project to project.
Sooooooo, mid to late April I got a call of Dan from QED asking if i was available for a week to to do some projection mapping onto some mountain sides in Spain. Naturally with a proposal like that I said yes.
After a longer chat on the phone, some arrangements of flights and accommodation, a meet up with Harry in Gatwick and then an super early origin flight for all of us, we were eventually at Almeria with was the area we were going to be projecting.
The gig was for Lexus, we were projecting specifically created animations by video designer Edgar Davey onto huge rock faces and ran the video to cue whist a 3 million pid prototype car drove past and was filmed. The whole thing sounds pretty crazy and actually was. All of the crew were stoping in a villa complex and we had all of our kit in the courtyard, projectors, lenses etc. In addition to the projects sense sand cabling infrastructure we had a small camper van with a pair of d3 4×4 media servers strapped int he back for us to do the projection mapping with.
In total we had 3 locations which we were going to project onto that week and I decided to make some specific line grids for each one. The first one I included my standard kitten which I stole from the internet in November 2015 she’s called Doris. as soon as it started getting dar and we could see some form of gird, Dan and myself started lining up onto the rock face. it was a really good system using d3 multi edit as we both started on a projector either side of the centre and work out either side, a very good use peoples time and resources.
Once we were lined up, on which we were using 4 x Christies Boxers and 1 x Panasonic 12k we were ready for the shoot. The premise was that the car drove around and then the animation was created to “track the car”. After few takes and refining the cue timings we got a brilliant shot.
I decided to bring up one of the standard d3 images (Lena) onto he canvas and just by chance here eyes lined up perfectly with the hill side, i love this picture.
Here is a video of the actual advert, its pretty good though only shows a small portion if the work which was done by the team.
Lexus – Into the Light
The second day we were ono another filming location, due to tit being a long filming schedule we split the shift so Steve and Harry setup during the day then Dan and myself took over for the lineup and operating on a nighttime.
The picture above shows the really looooong shot we had to make, I think we were around 300m away from the rock face for this one. I was impressed by Dans ability to work out quite quickly in his head what lenses we needed.
On the same day (second day) we projection mapped the engine of the car. Although to be honest, Edgar who created the content took the most amazing guess of the angle of the projector position, tower height, distance to car, and rendered out the content to that. When we reprojected the animation it fitted perfectly!!
The whole premise of the shoot/advert was that everything was “for real”, this meant that alongside the car advert there is also another viral advert talking about the making of. You should watch it even if you only have a hint of geek inside you, its interesting.
Lexus LC – Into the light : THE MAKING OF
Tis particular night was a productive but quite a long night we achieved allot. When Dan and myself left sight it was light, and we were both a bit giddy from sleep depravation. I was driving us in the camper van back to the villa around some serious steep cliff drops.
Story is we made it home!
Below is day three, final day, for me this was the least inspiring location, we had 3 boxers pointing at a cliff face. it still looks really good but didn’t have the panache of the previous 2 nigts.
Whilst we were waiting for dark, Dan and myself decided to climb up to the highest point on the hill. `if you look at the highest point in the picture above (in the middle) . Thats where we are sat in the picture below.
It was a great place to be working out of and at the same time I do enjoy working with the QED chaps, fun times!!
