PALACE PROJECTION
12 October 2014
Celebrations for the 555th anniversary of Romania’s capitol city Bucharest reached a peak last month with some 100,000 people – and their mobile phones – entranced by one of the largest projection mapping projects ever seen, on the façade of the Palace of the Parliament.
Local event stager 360 Revolution managed the technical side of the iMapp 555 event, and called in newly founded Hungarian videomapping specialist Maxin10sity to handle the colossal task of creating the videomapping as well as organising the content created by teams of artists from Romania, France, Czech Republic, Poland and Hungary. The duration of each animation was a symbolic 5 minutes and 55 seconds, and all five videos were projected on a loop.
At 270m long and 86m, the building boasted a total projection area of 23,000sqm. It took Maxin10sity three weeks to complete the laser scan and 3D modelling of the façade before sending it to the artists, and the scanning was so precise that there was only a 2cm shift at most in the end.
“For a project of this scale, 8K resolution quickly became obvious,“ says Maxin10sity’s art director András Sass, who was in charge of developing the content with his colleague László Czigány.
“We wanted the audience to experience this wow factor while at the same time create some emotion. Working with this resolution allowed us to dramatically improve the rendering and deliver very sharp images.
“While working on the animation, we really pushed the software to the limit and, to the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that a projection mapping has ever been carried out in such detail. For example, we created a rendering with millions of particles that would agglomerate to shape the Parliament, before being blown by the wind the next second to create other forms. It was not easy to create, preview and handle all this data, but we were able to achieve a great result.”
In order to project on the whole surface, 104 Panasonic PT-DZ21K three-chip DLP projectors were sourced from German company Lang AG – arguably the most projectors ever used for a projection mapping project, with an output of more than 2,000,000 lumens.
The projectors were installed in six different towers and arranged in 14 clusters: two clusters of two projectors, 10 clusters of eight, and two clusters of 10 (surprisingly, the green credentials were quite impressive as a single truck delivered the projection equipment, and all 104 projectors used only 260kW). All projectors were controlled by five Pandora Box QUAD Server systems from Coolux, also courtesy of Lang.
Watch the full video from Maxin10sity here
360 Revolution: 360revolution.ro
Maxin10sity: www.maxin10sity.com
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