This was the third year Pete from Hawthorn asked me to come and work on Adobe Summit London, the yearly meet about everything Adobe. I think it was around late Feb, Pete had been sent some ideas from Russel for the centrepiece of the delegates meeting area which was a 6m diameter object called “Pulse” representing brain of Adobe Sensei. The challenge with this one was to plan the projection so it was bright enough to be visible in the ambient light of the are and for the projector positions to be non intrusive. There was quite allot of email conversations and sharing visualisations of projector positions and trying to keep as even coverage as possible. I use a combination cinema 4d and d3 (disguise) to work out projection. Below is an early cinema screenshot and also a almost finalised d3 projector setup.
After finalising the study I asked Rich for a second opinionon the setup just to be sure. Rich had a beta release of d3_r15 and sent back lovely stage output showing the heat map with a thumbs up.
The Pulse was just one d3 element of the Adobe event I was looking after there was also the, plenary which was the main conference presentation area and also the party room where there was a 10m projection mapped tower. This video below by Hawthorn really shows off the event.
For the install and running of the event the d3 team consisted of Rich Porter, Sam Lisher and myself. We were together for the first few days for the install of the pulse then I branched off into the plenary where i was looking after the programming and running of the conference show. It was so so good working with Rich & Sam knowing that they could just make things happen and overcome any technical challenges. Rich, I’m sorry but the only photo I have of you two is you with your eyes closed.
This was us in our coffee shop office in Excel finalising some of the 3d stuff and generally having geeky conversations.
There was allot of physical assembly cabling and infrastructure to go into the gig to, of which Dave and his team did a Stirling job. In addition to the projection on the Pulse there was an LED floor, 8 monitors on the floor, 8 led screens around the perimeter and also a load of creative led tube displaying content.
Pulse being assembled from its fibreglass component part above and below the creative LED tubes being rigged and put in place. It was nice to see the everything coming to life after spending a few weeks converting and UV’ing cad to OBJ for d3 .
I spent quit a bit of time modelling and doing a tidy UV for the LED strip, below is the final version of the pixel map for the guys looking after the LED strip. Below is a top down view in d3 on the plane i applied the parallel map to push content to the led strips
Below is the pixel template for the led strips which matches up with the above map. The top cluster are the long strips going in order 1 to 25 and the bottom cluster are the shorter led strips 1 to 25 top to bottom.
I also made the start pixel of each of the led modules in the physical construction green and the end pixel red with a coloured gradient to A show the run of led and B easy identify the direction of the module.
It such a feeling of satisfaction when it gets rigged and you drop the map in and it looks exactly how you planned it, much to the credit of Justin who was mapping the modules onto the map in the Brompton processors.
MESHING ABOUT
Things were well underway on the Sunday when I left Sam and Rich to do the line up on the pulse, there was a point where using quick cal we couldn’t line it up, things just weren’t dropping into place as normal. Pete had organised a laser scan of the structure and we had adjusted the existing model to the actual can data and it shoud have just lined up quite easy but it didn’t. We can only summarise that in the process of reducing the triangle count when converting taking the point could data to a mesh some edges and critical points had gotten “dulled” or discarded resulting in slightly off final mesh. Not to anyone fault as no-one was really away of how the fine tolerances we were working to. the rish to turn around the point cloud and reduce the size of the mesh to get it to us quickly in a small file size was probably a large factor in this. We eventually got the raw point cloud data and Rich re-meshed from scratch and after this everything started to work as expected.
This is the UV for the Pulse, Cinimod did the content for the exhibit and took my OBJ and UV’d it to work best for their content creation. From here I got Cinimod’s UV’s pulse and generated a lineup grif by applying textures to the mesh and then baking this out onto the UV. I then added numbering and letters to identify key elements of the structure to have a fighting chance at lineup.
Sam and Rich done an fantastic job of lineup and blending everything as well a s programming the timeline to work with Cinimods OSC triggers from their interactivity software.
Sam (holding the pulse) & Rich (right)
For the interactivity element of the Pulse, Cinimod created a station where delegates got their face scanned and placed a small version of the pulse onto the centre holder, and based off the users facial expression and their choice of pulse dictated what content was displayed on the floor, led pulse and surrounding floor screens.
So! That was a technical rundown of one element of Adobe Summit 2018 London, i wasn’t intending to write so much and have so many pictures but there you go, i couldn’t have described it with any less. The whole thing was brought together by massive team and credit to everyone for pulling a technically packed event well managed by Pete Harding.
Im in Moscow working for Whitlight in-turn working for ITV on the Russian world cup, I’m looking after d3 (disguise) content to screens in the studio where we are based int he middle of Red Square. We’ve been here for just over 2 weeks and tomorrow and are here for another 4 weeks.
Its been such a long time in posting, I’ve been wanting to do an update post and catch up on the past year but the sear amount to cover is pretty daunting, its been a busy 12 month. Instead of trying to catch up here is what I’m up to now, we have a medium size studio with a view out onto red square and LED screens either side. In addition we have another LED screen which can be brought in and out which covers the window giving us the ability to fake that the studio is in the stadium, below is a shot taken of d3 my TX monitor.
I have a brilliant little snug in the studio which looks small from the outside but is the ideal amount of space and also out of the way so you don’t end up with people putting shit on your desk.
This isn’t just any studio, this is an augmented reality studio on a couple of levels, the side LED screens serve a couple of purpose. The either have a background and a graphic on framing the presenters, or they are relaying the feed from 2 cameras behind the led looking out of the window. The camera relay serves to extend the view out of the window using the LED as “fake windows”, to help wit this effect the Jib camera is sending out traking data using the Stype system so the camera images are manipulated as the camera moves adding to the effect that the LED really is a window. Below is the only photo I have, I hadn’t really taken many pictures and wasnt intending to blog about this but the words seem to have flowed starting again.
This was in the early stages of image alignment, the fake AR roof is looking pretty good but there was allot more work went into the sides. Its an incredibly difficult task trying to align and manipulate a 2D flat image (the camera view) to a 3d enviromnent like this and get the foreground and background elements of the 2D plate to match. Deltatre are looking after the looking after the tracking and manipulation of the camera images and passing those to d3 and then I’m mapping these to the LED, The Detatre team have done a really good job and the AR & Perspective matching is looking really good now.
I forgot to mention that in addition to the “through the window” perspective tracking, there is also a fake AR dome which is composited on to he final studio shot before going out on TX. The fourth image in this blog shows this pretty well.
Its been a good couple of weeks so far, have a look at this video presented by Andy who championed and made the 2 level AR idea happen in the ITV Sport studio. I’ve written this post in less than 90 minutes whist the match is on. I feel pretty rusty at writing these posts so hopefully they will get better!
Straight from the job in Paris I was on the Eurostar and back in London for my next job, i knew that we had a a huge circular gauze and 12 x 0.68:1projectors to cover it as id been doing the projection planning in the run up to it. I got to site and met Rob who was running the job and we went through what was what and where, ti was quite a nice easy start to the job, not too rushed , just steady.
Above, this is Gary setting up the skinny laser which I had initially planned to use when lining up the projection on the gauze to get an equal horizon all the way around. In addition to the gauze we had a huge led floor which tied in with he projection on the gauze.
I was using d3 my favourite weapon of choice to line this up and had thought allot about the best method to do this when setting up the project. I made sure that the cylinder object in the project had vertex with matched divisions on the led floor, tis meant i had the perfect starting point for quick cal. I literally put a rotational lineup grid on the LED floor and used these to quick cal the projects to for the bottom points of the gauze.
For the upper points, placed a horizontal laser up to the height of the top of the virtual mesh and then used another vertical laser to mark the vertices where the lasers crossed. this meant I could create a point in the physical world which twas almost identical to the location in the virtual world giving me perfect quick cal points.
The method worked really well and was very pleased that the thought and effort to get the model and the lineup grids spot on paid off. The gauze id bow in once it was stretched but that was the nature of fabric without any support in the centre. A little subtle warp between all the projectors pulled this in.
The event was a “secret gig” by the band Royal Blood and also a launch event of the Samsung Galaxy S8. Normally the drummer would have a drum man down which helped the tech place the drums in the correct place each time but also helps to stop them sliding about on the floor. For this gig the whole floor needed to be visible and they were gluing small blocks to the floor to keep the drum feet inlace. I cant remember how it came about but I ended up making a exact photoshop drum mat based on a photo of the original mat. I then put it on the led floor, and because I knew the pitch of the led it was scaled perfectly first time when displayed on the led floor.
With a little pit of positioning and rotation the bands drum tech placed the kit on the led floor marks and pretty much perfectly lined up correctly. It was a really satisfying task and looked pretty cool at the same time.
Bryte Design were uncharge of the design for the event and Jack Banks was uncharge of creative video. It was nice to meet the Bryte team and also to meet Jack again who we figured out we had met a million years ago taking part in the first d3 training back in 2011.
The gig went well and everyone was pretty happy, theres a video for one of the songs below. I don’t think the videos do this gig any justice, it was much better in person.
After finishing in Milan i was on an early morning flight to Paris to do a job for ITR, I knew nothing abut the job apart that it was a secret. I landed front he airport and got a taxi to the Grand Palais and after a bit of hanging around and filling in forms I eventually got my pass and awaited for the rest of the team to turn up.
Sooooooo, to pause here, the film isn’t out yet and I’m unable to post any of the tech production pictures so the rest of the post is going to be full of people and things.
The film, by the way is/was Mission Impossible 6 which I think is released eventually next year (early 2018).
I knew Nik (left) was out on the team and when i got there I met everyone else and knew that I knew Rich (right) but couldn’t remember from where. Eventually we narrowed it tow to a boring conference in Birmingham and I revered him telling me he had just bought a party bus.
This is a manhole cover one which I passed each day on the way into work each day, I’m assuming that it was pretty old and liked the design of it as it looked nice and was functional.
The setup went ok, in fact to was exceptionally straight froward, 7 large LED screens and 4 feeds for some 30K projectors which were generating a laser beam effect as its really bad if you point powerful lasers at people and down the lens of a camera. The above image is a cable found in one of out flight cases when looking for an XLR, no no no.
This is the view above our control area, there was quite a considerable amount and rigging went into the venue and I was surprised at how much weight loading the venue could take.
This was outside the Grand Palais, the centre visual banner ties in closely with the scene we were shooting. This is where all the extras came in to, it think there was about 150 extras all together.
This is some more of the team on our daily commute to work when we decided to walk rather than take the bus into work. From left to right we have Rupert, Rich (behind Rupert) Seth who you cant see but he’s behind Lee, and then theres me with that puzzled selfie face.
For the first few days we were working days, getting kit in the right place and setting up the servers. after getting settled we all went out in Paris for some drinks and food. After having a couple of drinks in a bar Rupert and myself went off in a splinter cell and found this little place called Zero Zero. Imm a big fan of finding these places which may of my friends call Sheds, but there always brilliant and you meet an assortment off people there.
this is the address and some pictures here and below this is Nik trying to get out but I thin he really wanted to stay 🙂
So, quite a random blogpost but a good star on these little posts to get up to date with things. If I can stick to 2 or three of these bite size posts a week then it should teak along to catch up on over 6 months of shenanigans. Next post I’ll be able to post some pictures of the gig, in the meantime heres a face found in Waldos warehouse!
Currently in Milan looking after an install for Bluman Associates at Milan design week, last day of the exhibition today, but more of that later.
The year started in Hull arriving on the 26th December as part of the team looking after projection for Hulls capital of culture celebrations. There were several sites and I was looking after the d3 for projection onto The Deep.
I arrived quite early and got the Mavic out over the bay and got a decent shot of the building from about 30m up.
At about 10:00 after being inducted to the site the projectors were loaded in, 24 in all and we were based in the building across the river to the deep with all the projection located on the balcony shooting across the water.
As the day got on and it was getting close to lining up the projectors the fog started rolling in which looked quite beautiful but made our job rather difficult. Pete, Stewart, Fergus and myself spent quite a bit of time on radios located at control and next to the building in an attempt to get coverage and convergence.
The following night was a little clearer and we were surprised how close we had gotten the lineup and convergence the previous night considering the lack of visibility. We continued to get it tighter and were joined by Simon who was producing the content for the show.
After may tweaks and content changes we were there, all set and ready for the new years day celebrations.
The deep was just one part of the city wide projection with Rich and the team looking after the main square which looked awesome!
Following Hull I was straight onto the next job driving to london to work at the Opera House with Tal Rosner on “Les Enfant Terrible” This was going to be quite a challenge as we had 5 pieces of stage set which rotated, were projected on and was tracked with projection. I had been working on the project from late November setting up the d3 project and doing all the modelling and UV’ing of the stage set providing templates for Tal. ArtAV provided the OSC tracking encoders which worked well.
I had all my servers on the project and was quite pleasing to be able to provide the whole workflow service and playback tech in one package. We had 5 days in the rehearsal space to visualise and a huge amount of animating from Tal, I also did a few scenes on the show using lighting effects in C4d and baking the light passes out to the UV texture.
We had a short time to get in and setup in the Barbican and this was the first time I ever had, to see how well the model lined up with the real set. After a couple of goes using d3 QuickCal trying different reference point combinations the projection popped into place.
There was also the tracking element to test making sure the physical rotation and the virtual rotation were in sync. After a few tweaks with the damping factor an many test rotations it was sweet.
I was very pleased with initial lineup tests, now it was time to finalise the lineup and start some very intense programming with new content and many many changes.
We had 3 shows in total which were well received and lots like it may get remounted next year once the Limbery theatre is finished at the ROH.
With a couple of days break after Les Enfant I was off to a Job for Hawthorn at the intercontinental which involved projecting onto a cylindrical screen. The screen also opened up in the middle and was tracked with projection inside and out with the front of the screen opening up to rotate round and becoming the back of the stage. Im unable to post any images and tech details of this yet but once its been out in the press I’ll get something up. It was a very interesting and challenging project which i want to share.
Right after the job I cant post about I was off to Hawthorn Cambridge office to to some preproduction on the BBC showcase gig. After 3 days in the office we were all off to Liverpool Echo arena, Hawthorn have been doing this event for a number of years and this was my first time.
I had been planning the project setup and gotten the templates out in a few weeks leading up to this. Once were got mostly set up content started coming in thick and fast.There were some technical challenges which we managed to overcome and it felt like a solid team pulling together on this.
There were several long days on this job but well worth it with the result we got and really good team effort.
Night 2 of the event involved a gala dinner enveloped in 5 x 4k screens of projection, it was a tight turnaround and looked amazing once we were all lined up.
The content was new footage from the new Planet Earth 2 and looked absolutely stunning. We used d3 to frame various elements of the content and various mappings to make best use of the space and footage. More details can be found Here
After a quick pitstop up north to see friends and family I was back down London working for Impact Production Services providing the servers and support for the Kong premier at Leicester Square. It was nice to catch up with the guys who I hand t seen in ages!
Straight from Kong i was again working for Bluman Associates looking after the d3 programming a lineup for the launch go the new Swatch Watch range. Lewis White was directing the content Notch, David Bajt was also onboard along with Jan Urbanowski & David Altweger. It was a great team with a whole load of Notch content.
We had 5 days in rehearsals with the dancers where we used various notch effects, straight content playback and some Kinekt tracking too. We had a very short set and rehearsal time in the venue which was 180 The Strand, everything went well and a good time was had by all!
Right after the gig after packing down the servers I was headed to Heathrow airport where I had 4 hours sleep in the Yotel which was quite comfortable then was on an early plane to Dubai to work with 59 Productions on the Dubai World Cup horse race.
Our control position was a lovely little porta cabin in the underground carpark of the Meydan which we affectionately named “The Meth Lab”. Scott and myself were programming the d3. Heres a very happy pic of Scott, Allam, myself & Chris getting round site in the golf buggy.
59 were doing the content for the 100m wide LED screen for the opening and closing shows. We had a team of animators onsite and remotely updating content, filming and making new contnent to keep up with the clients changing requirements.
The show went well but was hampered by the weather which was surprisingly wet considering we were in Dubai.
On lockdown day before the show we weren’t allowed to come to site between 12:00 & 20:00 so we decided to go to the waterpark. Heres a picture of Nickin being a tourist.
Im not sure how many visitors were at the show but it was a fair few and the prize for the main race was over $10 million dollars.
After the show we managed to get some food and beers, heres a picture of us looking tired and relieved, I’m not sire how Slaney managed to escape the photo!
Straight after Dubai I was on a 03:50 flight in the morning to Frankfurt where I was to prep the d3 servers for a Bluman job on Milan Design week. Because of the weather, all the flights in Dubai were screwed up and mu flight was cancelled and I got bumped onto a 08:50 flight in the morning which as then delayed until 13:00 then we sat on the runway for 2 hours waiting for a takeoff slot. I eventually got to the hotel in Frankfurt feeling very tired and smelly.
Andy Joyes joint me in Frankfurt to prep kit then we flew out to Milan on the Tuesday night to meet the rest of the team for the install. The Job was for the launch of the new Samsung S8 and is part of Milan Design week. Universal Everything were doing realtime generative content for some surfaces we called petals designed by Zaha Hadid architects.
David Bajt and myself had both been working on the project since late February and this was the culmination of the planning.
I was capturing the realtime graphics from the Unity servers into d3 and then using d3 to align the content to the screens and blend. It was quite a challenging lineup with the lack of reference points and having to calibrate warp and lend 14 projectors. Each petal had 2x 10K units pointing at it. The final effect was superb with so many people coming to visit the exhibition each day
So that was quite satisfying writing about the past 3 months, its been an incredibly busy start to the year and doesn’t look like its going to slow down at all!
Heres a face i found in the doorstop t the venue were in, Zippy!
Hello, how are you doing, its been a very long time since posting here such a busy 2016. Too much has happened to split this down into separate posts so here it is, the past 6 months rolled up packed down and squeezed into a mega post!
Rewinding all the way back to June 2016 i was in the Royal Court programming a Show Called Unreachable for Zsolt.
It was a interesting show to work on as for the whole show there was only 3 minutes of video at the end. Infant the whole stage was pretty bare until the very end where all of the set flew in, the whole lighting rig used, smoke, fans and also a fox on stage called oscar.
We had 2 projectors, one onstage with a super short throw lens and also a 10k out front, it was pretty tight to fit the supersede onstage as there were a load of trees flown in the grid.
Because everything was flown in at the end and we were projecting on and through gauze, i made a line grid with used parts of the bare stage to make sure the alignment had not moved.
This was the stage with he trees in, actual trees cut for the job and mounted with flying steels, pretty bankers for such a little stage too. Good fun and nice to work with Zsolt and the nice people at the court again.
During the couple of weeks at the court I got an invite from Wolfgang to see a performance Be One at The Hive in Kew Gardens. It was a really cool setting for the piece and also nice to see everyone and not to be working.
I think it must have been July and i was in newcastle for the weekend when James and myself decided to take the kites out at Drudge bay on the weekend. It must have been about 3 years since we had had them out and had forgotten how powerful the wind can be.
I only got out the 6meter peter Lynn out and James had the 4m Blade out, I think it was a blade. Anyway, he got a good beating by the wind, you cant really see here but thats a layer of skin gone, ouch!
Around July I was working with 59 Productions where we were projection mapping onto a cello for the abc proms advert. I had done some RD earlier in the year and then Max setup the project for the shoot.
We tracked the cello using Blacktrax and used d3 for the mapping, it was a really tight window of 4 hours with Sol but we managed to get some good results.
Below is the final video from the BBC.
Following this I was off to Farnborough airshow working with Chris Simcock to projection map onto a 5m replica of an aeroplane.
The physical model was incredibly well built and the 3d model generated by Rowan was excellent too. Chris was there a couple of days before and there was a bit of moving around projectors. Once everything in it was a really neat installation. The final Client was GKN who were pretty pleased with the result.
I was looking after the servers for the week and checking the alignment, the client also wanted to be able to trigger the installation with a button push. I had been working on a little personal project to create a d3 Bosc controller using cherry key switches and an Arduino. with he bits i had on me i managed to make this happen for the client, triggering the installation on cue.
I think we must be late July now where i was off to Beirut to do a one off gig looking after Catalyst for Jvan on a Jean-Michel Jarre gig
.
He was performing in some old Roman ruins at Baalbek with was a pretty epic setting.
After setting up and after the first soundcheck i realised that the stage wasn’t that solidly built and everything was rattling to shit with the base and lack of bracing. In the end, gafa taping down the laptops on foam on lids, and taping in the connectors was the solution.
The stage design was several led screens of different depths and lots of lasers!!
There was some pretty epic old synths onstage and a pretty cool gig to be on after watching Jarre on the tv as a kid when he dine his new your show.
LASER HARP!! fully functional, such a site!
After returning from Lebanon i was heading up to Edinburgh to work with Fiftynine as part of the d3 team projecting on the castle. Blue-i
I think it was 42 projectors which we had pointing at the castle, over the few nights of lines we went through a few coverage configurations to enhance parts to suit the content.
In some areas we had Megastacks which was essentially 12 projectors overlaid. The content team pulled some crazy hours on this and everyone pulled together to pull this off. It was pretty impressive to see this scale of projection.
Heres picture of a castle projected on a castle.
Coming back from Edinburgh I had a few days off and my PCB which i had designed and ordered had been delivered. This was for the button to OSC control surface i was working on.
Its essentially an Arduino and cherry key switches on a custom PCB, it works really well though i yet still to move on with this project and get revision2 which has abetter PCB layout and LED feedback.
Still in august i got a call form PRG to do g gig in Prague woking after catalyst for a very, Very expensive Russian wedding.
It was in a very beautiful old building by the river which the entire inside was transformed into a gothic mansion.
The system was a Catalyst system consisting of 12 Apple Dustbins to cover the whole space, it was a odd one as it was definitely a d3 job but the Russian client insisted on catalyst.
I setup the system and then headed of there the system to Serge who spent 2 days tweaking exact maps. Pete and the boys did an excellent job of projector placement as when we got to site there were these huge chandeliers in the way which were bigger than expected due to the added decoration.
The show went well, there was a very drunk wedding party and there was so much can that the following day after the load out we helped ourselves to a bit of cake.
Pretty much straight after Prague i was off to Dubai to do a job for David Bajt working with Protec. The gig was the unveiling of the model box for the new metro station for the Dubai 2020Expo
It was a huge gig and only for a handful of people and the Sheik, the above picture is the middle of the installation which was a LED screen cube with a wrap around content on all 4 sides and the roof, the content was beautifully done.
The presentation consisted of 2 Zendome tent structures and the LED cube in the middle. The guests came into he first Planetarium Zendome which we were projecting onto a projection skin which was vacuumed up onto he inside. Unfortunately both vacuum controllers for this got damaged and we only had a saggy dome for the first couple of days for lineup.
On of the tent people managed to make one of the controllers work temporarily which meant we could make a start on lining up 7 projectors to fill the screen with pixels.
Over a period of a few days and after we finally got a stable dome we managed a proper lineup, below is the initial lineup attempting to use quick cal and several lasers based on the dome being the shape that it says it is in the documentation.
The quickCal got me so far but it was quite clear that the advertised shape of the dome and the actual she of the dome was different. I decided to take a survey of the dome with a laser plumb and a laser measure and took measurements from the floor to the roof every 100mm to profile the actual shape of the dome.
It worked out hat i took about 200 measurements, brought these into a spreadsheet and then remodelled the dome in C4d to get the actual shape. Below shows the difference int he domes. Tot he right is the advertised dome and to the left is the actual shape
Because the dome relies on a constant vacuum pressure to keep it inlace and the temperature outside would vary as we were outside in Dubai, constant tweaking was needed to keep it aligned, pretty happy with he lineup on this one.
It was good to work wth the Protec guys who were super professional and fun at the same time. Heres a blurry pic of me inside the LED cube, I’m pretty sure everyone done this. Post Dubai i was back in the UK and had about a wee of no work which meant I could catch up with friends and family. It was a very short week, or it just went over super fast. No siren was that week over i was down london to work with Tal on a show called “Shopping and Fucking” at the Lyric. It was quite a crazy but fun show to work on and put together by a great team directed by Sean.
I ended up doing a bit of content on this mainly 3d for various sections. Heres a picture of Tal captured wth 123D Catch imported into c4d with a HDRI lighthouse environment, no reason to do this impart from learning ;).
Straight after this I did a one off gig for Dan Bond covering his Suede gig in Bilbao, the first half of the show was Suedes NightThoughts album which has a Film played along with it projected onto a front gauze. I was triggering this off catalyst based on the Lyrics timing and beat. I spent quit a bit of time running though the video, id never listened to Suede intentionally before this but now i think I’ve listened to Night Thought about 10 times.
Back from Bilbao I was at ArtAv to do some testing with some Encoders to OSC devices they were developing for a job in January. I spent a day there testing my d3 servers and the encoders, then the following week Steve and myself were at Dance city doing some more tests after some software mods. Heres picture of Steve equating like a Slovak watching a spinning piece of cardboard.
Late October I was doing a little d3 job for VER on Alan Carrs 12 Stars of Xmas. It was a pretty good week which involved switching feeds to LeD screens on a set where the windows opened like advent calendar windows. Below is Raymond the racoon staring in my lineup grids.
Not long after this my Mavic pro turned up in the post, i wasn’t expecting this to appear till atlas mid December so it was a nice surprise. This was the first drone I’ve owned in 3 years, prior to this i built a DJI f550 then after that a Freefly Cinestar which was so big it scared the shit out of me each time i flew it.
The first time i took out the Mavic I took it tot he place i flew my first drone, just up form Winlaton Mill. It is really responsive to fly and the handling is amazing, I’m so impressed in how myth e technology has came on in the past few year.
Heres a picture of the lovely little village of Winlaton Mill.
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Mid November I got a call from Video Design to go down for a couple of d3 jobs which consisted of project setup for some protection tests in the warehouse for a UK tour this year and the second job was for an artist doing a slot on the XFactor.
The Factor was a tricky one as we had limited time to get it in and there were pretty much no reference parks to quickCal to. I had 3 projectors rear projecting onto a curve and also 2 more projectors hitting the floor, 5 in total to get in in under an hour.
In the end i make some measurements not he model and replicated them on the physical set to Cal to, this worked pretty well and the client and production were happy.
The rest of November and December is taken up with a job I’m not aloud to talk about, so instead heres some pictures of when i went to Brooklands one Saturday whilst waiting for my laundry to be done. Heres Concord from below.
If your close by its really worth a trip to Brooklands museum, theres loads of history there and a really nice way to spend an afternoon. Best to go on a nice day as quite allot of the exhibits are outside. Below is the Barnes Wallos Stratosphere chamber, just google it, its like a wind tunnel on steroids, and t thin this was built all those years ago and functioned how it did is amazing.
On the 9th December i was off to Berlin with friends to see Nicholas Jaar DJ at Columbia Halle. When the tickets came on sale I booked 4 tickets straight away, the gig seems like such a long time ago no even though it was only 2 month!
The gig was really really good, Jaar played allot of familiar stuff and did some really long build ups. I don’t normally go to see DJ’s but this was epic such a good night.
After the gig tony had got us on the guest list to Tresor which we stayed there till about 04:00 then after that we went to tome of my most favourite places in Berlin EmmaPea cafe by day, cosy club by night.
During our time in Berlin we had the chance to catch up with Ben which construed of a lovely afternoon of eating chatting wandering and taking pictures of stuff in the semi foggy air.
After begin I was back on the gig that I cant talk about, there was quite allot of prep went into this gig as we had a MASSIVE led screen driven from several really nice m8 video processors totalling 8 x 4k feeds.
One evening after i was the only one left and i was doing some tests on the led and the pipeline I decided to try some moire experiments. I love the effect of moire its a like making digital a bit more analogue, its difficult to show here but heres some pictures of a huge led screen with stuff on.
This is no more than single pixel lines soared at 2 pixel divisions on the right side and 1 pixel divisions on the left side and rotated by 7 degrees
More rotation, this is really interesting when your stood next to it. die to the fact that the led screen was so bug it covered a wide field of view and when the line pattern was rotating it was difficult to perceive depth.
More lines with the pixel shader occluding the green pixels in the distance giving the magenta falloff.
So, back to work! I team apparent that for this job we needed to apply LUT (colour look up tables) tot he content based on the calibration of the led screen. d3 couldn’t do this natively but with the use of Notch and a beautifully simple notch patch we were able to apply LUT and colour grading to the content on the fly. This technique meant that the content guys only had to give us one base grade and then of they wanted to change the trade they gave us the LUT saving hours of re-rendering.
I left his job on the 21st December leaving behind the gift of a cheap but effective led mirrorball from Amazon to complete the setup of video control, it was appreciated by almost everyone.
Thats it, it feels like its taken me faking ages to write this, i did start writing this 15 days ago about on the 27th January dipping in and out but its finally done, the last 6 month of 2016. To finish off, familiar to most people heres a face in a flight case catch.
Straight after landing from Venice after coming form he ArtAV job i drove to Brighton where I had planned to stay the night, catch up with friends and see Novak’s projection mapping pice on the Brighton dome as part of the festival.
It was about an hour and a half drive from Gatwick to Brighton, and such a sunny day, when i got there i checked into he hotel and then met up with the boys from QED for some food. Id been following this project with interest for a while from knowing the chaps at Novak and QED. Dan Grey and Rich Porter spent allot of time working on the best unwrap of the 3d scanned pavilion.
I saw some of the pre-vis in the Novak studio a couple of weeks before, the guys had done some beautiful light passes to great effect. In addition Dan had planned the projector placment so that it was possible to hit the columns on the front and behind meaning the possibility of multilayered content which I’ve never seen done before.
I finally got to see the show that evening after landing and it was so good, everyone had put 110% effort in all the way and it showed. The event was incredibly popular and more people turned up each night, more than was expected.
Dan at the helm of d3 operating the show above, the planning of the coverage was so crucial to this and he nailed it.
Straight after Brighton is was over to work with Nick from year culture to put in a video installation at Saddlers wells. The first couple of days were spent in a dressing room setting up the servers and testing the content and sync locally.
Then we had 3 days to install the projectors and set things up in the foyer of saddlers along with some excellent help form the saddlers team.
The show was called Nobody and featured many site specific art installations throughout the building from the backstage, basement and foh.
Michael Hulls instalation LightSpace was particularly fun and I bumped into Jan Urbanowsky who did the animation aspect of the LightSpace install which was nice.
This was all back in May and feels like such a ling time ago, more inforation about NoBody at saddlers can be found here –> NoBody
Andy Finally heres a happy face from the Grnville Hotel Brighton!
It started for me on the 21st of April when I was down at the ArtAV headquarters preparing for the Irish entry to the Venice architecture Biennale. The entry was buy Niall McLaughlin Architects and was called Losing Myself which reflects on architectural spaces, Alzheimers disease and other forms of dementia.
The physical part of the installation consists of 16 projectors on quad-pods (like tripods but with 4 legs) Projecting down on the floor. Each of the individual projected images overlap by 2 pixels to create one whole image. I was responsible for the watch out layback and programming, before i arrived Steve Lez & Simon had been rigging the cabling for the speakers and projectors which drops straight down from the roof and into the projectors.
We spent a couple of days in a warehouse with the architects going through ideas and working out some of the technical aspects ready for the install in Venice. About 3 weeks later I was the first in Venice and met Dario, out Italian fixer for the job. We loaded the Kit from the docks onto a boat and then traveled with it on a boat to the Arsenale Biennale venue.
A few hours later Steve and Lez arrived as they were flying from somewhere else, we unpacked and checked the kit to make sure it had all arrived in once peice. The following day we had a relatively early start and got to work marking out the precise grid onto which we were to position the “quad pods”.
It was quite tricky marking out the grid as we had to take into consideration the angle of the beams in the roof where we were hanging cables and cable tray off. Coupled with a 200 year old non straight rood we had to avoid an pillar which was in the middle of the floor and had to weave between one of the quad-pods. It took a good few hours to get the floor grid placement correct but was important that we spent the time doing that.
I think this may have been the end of day three after a few long days of marking out, getting projectors into position and cables in the air. There was a local chap who was blacking out the windows in our space and make a lively set of raps for the doorway, we had quite a grand entrance!
The content didn’t arrive till quite late and came as a huge image sequence which I used ffmpeg on the watch out servers to encode to video. It was really pleasing to be encoding one single image sequence into 4 quadrants of video all parallel and could watch it live projected on the floor as each frame was encoded. The video was rendered out into 4 separate quadrants to enable smooth playback from Watchout as it struggled with a single 4k video.
Prior to coming out to venice i spent some time putting some of my own content together just to see what it would look like on such an unusual canvas. Above is just a simple pixel pattern using each projector as simple light source and making a cheesy disco floor. As well as the cheesy stuff I also modelled in 3d the actual quad-pods. I done a few directional light passes around the virtual model and baked the shadows onto the texture. This meant I could create “false shadows” of the legs. Below is an example of this with a fake light source emanating from the pillar casting a shadow on the floor, Im really interested in this effect of tricking the brain with light.
We managed to make good progress getting things ready in time so after the working day had finished I spent some time doing more quite simple animations that when viewed in this context were really pleasing to the eye. Below is concentric circles emanating from the legs.
And below a close up of a single set of concentric circles covering the whole canvas which I particularly like.
The brass legs take bright colours really well with the bounced reflection of the floor image.Strokes and triangles, when i was doing this loads of people took videos of it, it starts with simple lines coming from the edges and bouncing off each quad-pod leg creating a geometric spirograph effect. I’ll try and find a copy of some footage from someone and upload it to my Vimeo account, i keep meaning to make more of an effort to document stuff then kick myself when I don’t take enough pictures or footage.
I set up a limited company in April SEVENTHREE Productions and the cosplay logo has evolved into this (below) after a few iterations. Im still in the process of building a company website i like. The current one is being rebuilt and i still need to get my head around the sort of complex WordPress template.
After week and a bit in Venice we were done, the client was happy, the biennale people were happy and we were happy. It runs until the 27th November, if your close buy try and go and visit, theres some really cool stuff to see.
As a temporary departure from places in places, heres Lez’s happy smily face on the way to the airport in a water taxi!
Late January this year I received first an email and then a call from Peter Harding, one of the directors of Hawthorn. We had never met before but Sarah Cox from d3 had recommended me for a job they had coming up in May, on which they were using d3 for the first time. I was in Milan at the time and on my return from the Milan job I was landing in London and driving in Newcastle where I stopped off at Cambridge and met Peter about the forthcoming job.
After a chat and a coffee and getting an overview of the project I was onboard to look after the d3 project & programming.
The conference is called Adobe Summit. this are an Annual meet up of businesses and users of Adobe products in excel. Fast forward to April I went to Hawthorn in Leicester to do some testing with the setup. We had 2 x d34x4 and a 14,000px X 1080px initial content canvas plus a load of LED pixel mapping. The tests went swimmingly well and following month we were in ExCel setting up for the gig.
Nick was head of video for the main room, Tony was looking after E2 switching, Sleepy Tom was tech video guy and I was there looking after the d3’s & programming. It was a really fun team and under the pressure of such a size gig we still had a laugh.
There was quite a bit of pixel mapping as well as the playback of the main opening continent and essentially “backgrounds” for when the speakers were presenting. Downstage center of the stage were a set of 2.5m high letters spelling SUMMIT, which we were projection mapping onto, and also pixel mapping just under 100 DMX fixtures inside the letters to light up the opaque sides matching the fide content on the front.
There were also some CMY fixtures above the SUMMIT letters, which were pointing down to colorize the shadow behind, as we couldn’t hit that part of the screen with projection because of the letters.
And in addition on site I pixel mapped 22 Ayton blades that were running along the top of the set. After a few hours of tweaking and working with the lighting department we were all mapped and ready.
New content came when the client turned up and we got that in the system and basically went straight into rehearsals. It was a mixture of a really fast setup, then parts of waiting around allot then moments of being really busy. I’d never worked for Hawthorn before and dint realize how big the company was and how big this gig was until I arrived at ExCel for the first day. The entire of the conference center was taken over for the event with so much technical kit installed!
After rehearsals and 2 days of shows it was over, It was a great gig to be part of and meet some new friends.
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!!
This was the third year Pete from Hawthorn asked me to come and work on Adobe Summit London, the yearly meet about everything Adobe. I think it was around late Feb, Pete had been sent some ideas from Russel for the centrepiece of the delegates meeting area which was a 6m diameter object called “Pulse” representing brain of Adobe Sensei. The challenge with this one was to plan the projection so it was bright enough to be visible in the ambient light of the are and for the projector positions to be non intrusive.
There was quite allot of email conversations and sharing visualisations of projector positions and trying to keep as even coverage as possible. I use a combination cinema 4d and d3 (disguise) to work out projection. Below is an early cinema screenshot and also a almost finalised d3 projector setup.
Image courtesy Taylor Bennett Partners & Hawthorn
