BUCHAREST – Instead of 555 candles on a cake, the city celebrated by lighting up the expansive facade of the Palace of Parliament with large-format video projection. Hungarian videomapping specialist Maxin1osity took on the large-scale challenge, relying upon image processing technology from Germany-based coolux to get the job done.
More details from coolux (www.coolux.de):
With a floor surface of 350,000 sq m, the Palace of the Parliament in Bucharest, Romania is the world’s largest administrative building after the Pentagon. To celebrate the 555th anniversary of the capital city, Creart, the city cultural center decided to offer something special to the inhabitants of Bucharest. On Sept. 20, 2014, iMapp Bucharest 555 mesmerized a crowd of 100,000.
360 Revolution managed the technical side of the event, and called in Hungarian videomapping specialist Maxin1osity to handle the colossal task of creating a videomap as well as organizing all videoprojection content, and acting as a curator for the whole artistic performance. The duration of each animation was a symbolic 5 minutes and 55 seconds. All five videos were projected on a loop, giving the impression of a masterpiece with plural universes, telling the story and celebrating the city of Bucharest.
The Palace of the Parliament is 270m long with an 86 metres high front façade, boasting a total projection area of 23,000 sq m. Three weeks were required for Maxin10sity to complete the laser scan and 3D modeling of the façade before sending it to the artists. A Herculean task. In fact, the scanning was so precise that there was only a 2cm shift at most in the end. But the scale of the event wasn’t the only challenge. On top of managing the entire content, acting as the leader of a team representing five countries, the company was also busy working on its own content.
“For a project of this scale, 8K resolution quickly became obvious. We wanted the audience to experience this wowfactor while at the same time create some emotion”, comments András Sass, Maxin10sity’s Art Director who was in charge of developing the content with his colleague László Czigány. “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.”
Projectors were installed in six different towers and arranged in 14 clusters: two clusters of two projectors, ten clusters of eight and two clusters of ten. Considering the large number of projectors, the green credentials were quite impressive for this project, as a single truck was required to deliver the projection equipment, and all 104 projectors used only 260kW.
Boasting 20,000 lumens, with a contrast ratio of 10.000:1 and a 1920×1200 resolution (WUXGA), the PT-DZ21K reproduced razor-sharp and lifelike images on the façade. All projectors were controlled by five Pandora Box QUAD Server systems from Coolux (courtesy of LANG).
Maxin10sity has now been invited to create the videomapping projection for the opening ceremony of the second edition of the Signal Festival which will take place on 16 – 19 October 2014 in Prague.
Watch the full video here.
Note: Due to an editing error, an earlier posting referred to “Bucharest, Hungary.” Bucharest is in Romania. PLSN regrets the error.
