BUDAPEST – On June 20, 2015, the City of Karlsruhe kicked off a 15-week long summer festival to celebrate its 300th anniversary, with the Karlsruhe Palace playing a central role. Dancers and opera performers entertained a crowd of 40,000 before the evening was concluded by fireworks. Maxin10sity provided a 15 minute-long projection mapping performance for the event.
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The highpoint of the sold out evening was undoubtedly the 15-minute long projection mapping from sought after video mapping specialist Maxin10sity, who will be joined by other artists throughout the festival. The Schlosslichtspiele(Palace Light Projection), organised by Stadtmarketing Karlsruhe and curated by the Karlsruhe Centre for Art and Media (ZKM), will illuminate the entire southern façade of the Karlsruhe Palace until September 26.
For Peter Weibel, CEO and Chairman of the ZKM, choosing Maxin10sity to start the celebrations was an easy task: “When we saw their video mapping performance on the Bucharest Parliament for the 555th anniversary of the city last year, we were very impressed by their technical virtuosity and artistic approach,“ he confesses.
The creative brief given to Maxin10sity included references to illustrious figures from the city, such as Carl Benz and Heinrich Hertz, and the cooperation between both parties proved to be smooth. “We had very productive exchanges with Maxin10sity during the creation process, a perfect cooperation between visionaries,“ says Weibel.
The 300 Fragments show developed by Maxin10sity was complemented by a musical soundtrack created in-house, a first for the video mapping specialist. Seven people worked on the animation while two more focused on the soundtrack. “The music is perfectly synchronised with the content, enhancing the immersive experience,“ explains Maxin10sity’s Creative Director, András Sass. “Keeping an audience engaged for 15 minutes was no easy task, but the combination of content and music made the public forget about time and transport them in a daydream.”
Local creative agency PXNG.LI teamed up with AV-Active/Möhring for the technical side of the event, acting as facilitators between ZKM, the artists and solution providers. They delivered in particular all 3D models and textures required for nine groups of artists to develop their content.
Comments Dominik Rinnhofer, PXNG.LI CEO and Creative Director: “The castle wings have a 45 degrees angle, which made it particularly tricky as we had to work with three perspective cameras. The technical team at Maxin10sity offered their expertise to map the façade and ensure perfect 3D effects. Then the challenge for the 3D artists was to calculate the perspective renderings into an orthogonal template to match the façade.” The cameras were set up perpendicularly to the façade, before the content was merged into one single file.
PXNG.LI’s own artistic-project will premiere on August 1st, and will be the first interactive multiplayer game ever made on a façade.
To project on the 180 metres long by 20 metres high façade, 24 Panasonic 3 chip DLP®projectors were rigged in two towers tucked 80 metres away from the façade. The organisers tripled the number of projectors used, as the opening night was so close to the summer solstice, reaching 75 lux on the facade.
Each tower hosts four groups of three projectors shooting at various angles. All projectors were dry hired from Lang Medientechnik. And because the audience is very close to the castle, the projection surface has a resolution of almost 11K (10800 x 1080).
Concludes Weibel: “We wanted the audience to escape from reality and experience altered states of perception and consciousness, and thanks to Maxin10sity, we achieved exactly that.”
Maxin10sity’s popularity is growing in Europe and on an international level. The work from the video mapping specialist will be next seen in Germany at the first Berlin Festival of Lights which will take place from October 9-18 with projections on the iconic Brandenburg gate.
Watch the full video of 300 Fragments here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6u-EtJJSYrM
