NEW YORK – To help bring even more awareness to the already well-known Tribeca Film Festival for new presenting sponsor AT&T, agency Spinifex arranged for iconic moments from great films to be re-imagined and projection mapped by WorldStage onto the AT&T Long Lines Building in lower Manhattan.
More details from WorldStage (www.worldstage.com):
The 550-foot high AT&T Long Lines Building was an ideal choice for bringing the Tribeca Film Festival to the streets. The windowless skyscraper features a concrete slab façade clad with granite that acted as the 125-foot wide x 300-foot tall projection surface for a three-minute video that captivated New Yorkers watching on the streets below.
With the theme that great films are meant to be shared, the video projected an animated homage of memorable moments from cinema history: Muybridge’s racing horses, “King Kong” swatting airplanes from atop The Empire State Building, gears forming the face of Charlie Chaplin in “Modern Times,” the winding Yellow Brick Road of “The Wizard of Oz,” little Danny pedaling across the patterned hotel hallway carpet in “The Shining,” “ET” silhouetted against a full moon, ”Godzilla” crashing through a wall, the “Transformers” clicking into action, defying “Gravity” in outer space. All of the segments were re-imagined as playful, brightly colored graphics by Spinifex.
The video projection also invited New Yorkers to cast their votes via Twitter hashtag #FilmForAll for the one film every New Yorker should see. The winning film will be screened to the public in all five boroughs this summer. Selected voters were invited to have their avatars integrated with the Long Lines Building projection proving that every New Yorker has the makings of a movie star. The projection mapping was staged for five nights, April 22-26.
The WorldStage team lent its technical prowess to the complex outdoor job starting with painstaking preproduction planning and extending to being buffeted by 40 mph rooftop winds during the install and exhibition. The completed design was engineered to ensure there was enough light to make the projected images pop when viewed by New Yorkers on the street.
WorldStage supplied four banks of multiple projectors that delivered more than 300,000 lumens of illumination. The projectors were housed in temporary enclosures, furnished by Mountain Productions, and located on the roof of the building across the street from the Long Lines skyscraper. A d3 Technologies media server fed the projectors, providing super-accurate warping and pre-visualization capabilities.
Spinifex provided a system that enabled the integration of voters’ avatars; a camera located near the projectors captured an image of the customized projection and tweeted it back to the contributor.
The WorldStage team included account executive Lars Pedersen, project manager Tom Whipple, d3 programmers Peter Acken and Ben Keightly, network technician Kim Dowd, projectionists Alex Donaldson and Michael Johnson, and installation technicians Gabriel Weisberg and Jeff Wong.
