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!
