WALES – Ross Ashton and The Projection Studio have designed and coordinated a permanent 270 degree video projection installation featuring an adaptation of their successful work ‘Illuminata’ at Caerphilly Castle in Wales for CADW, the official guardian of the built heritage of Wales. The installed looped show with accompanying soundtrack is 10 minutes long.
More details from The Projection Studio (http://www.projecting.co.uk):
WALES – Ross Ashton and The Projection Studio have designed and coordinated a permanent 270 degree video projection installation featuring an adaptation of their successful work ‘Illuminata’ at Caerphilly Castle in Wales for CADW, the official guardian of the built heritage of Wales.
The show was originally a large format projection extravaganza created by Ashton and projected onto two buildings in the Castle’s main courtyard for two short festival events in 2010 and 2011. This proved so popular and accessible that CADW wanted to integrate it as a lasting tribute to the colorful history of the castle which could be enjoyed by the public year-round.
Says Ashton, “I was very honored to be asked to revise the show to run as a permanent work. It’s fantastic to see it have another lease of life and the chance to connect with so many more people in this reworked format which really retains all the drama and essence of the original.”
Five Optoma EW610ST projectors fitted with extremely short throw .52 lenses are used for the projections, which cover a surface area of around 3.5 meters tall (starting at about 80 cm off the floor) and 5.2 meters in diameter wrapping around the circular room, which is skinned with a smooth white plaster finish.
The projectors are rigged on custom mounts attached to the ceiling, focused out toward the circular walls.
The Projection Studio undertook all the storyboarding in collaboration with Karen Monid, the sound artist for the piece, and image creation and the animations were completed by Ashton and Paul Chatfield.
The installed looped show is 10 minutes long, 50 percent shorter then the original, which was a challenge but did not affect the outcome.
Other modifications were necessary to account for the fact that the images are now almost surrounding the audience as opposed to being viewed on two flat surfaces some distance away.
The objective was to fill as much of the room as possible with the projection, so visitors can feel immersed in the animated images.
The center of the room was made the focal point and it was crucial that no shadows could be cast on the projections by visitors standing too close.
The massive perspective correction needed, together with the soft edge blending of the five image sources, is dealt with by a Watchout control system. There were large overlaps in the images and massive differences in the depth of field due to the short throw lenses.
Using five projectors as opposed to four gave a center image that needed no blending, which was a big advantage to the aesthetics and using five devices also allowed them to produce a taller overall image.
“It took some serious calculations and understanding the physics of the matter to make the show fit into the space,” explains Ashton. “Even though it’s on a much smaller scale that we are usually working, it’s probably one of the most complex installations we’ve undertaken to date.”
A soundtrack was compiled and mixed by Monid for the looped show.
The Watchout control is located in the next room. It runs seven tracks of video and sound using an Echo AudioFire8 96kHz Firewire audio interface.
The installation is already proving popular and is one of a growing number of historical projected works produced by Ashton and his team worldwide.
