BOGOTÁ, Colombia – To tie in with the premiere of Transformers: Age of Extinction in Colombia, the rental-staging company Big Video used eight Christie 3DLP projectors for a projection-mapped display that lit up a 65-by-20-meter portion of the façade of the Calima shopping mall in Bogotá..
More details from Christie (www.christiedigital.com):
With a brief to promote the premiere of the fourth installment of the “Transformers” film series, the digital content development company LPX Digital was looking to create a big impact. And the best way to do it was projection mapping onto Colombia’s second biggest shopping mall, which pulls in thousands of people every day.
To turn its idea into a reality it called on the services of Big Video, Colombia’s leading name in high-profile projection mapping. And, right from the word go, Big Video knew that only Christie projectors would guarantee the power, brightness and resolution required for the job.
Big Video got down to work immediately and designed a matrix of six Christie Roadster S+20K (3DLP technology, 20,000 lumens, SXGA+ resolution) and two Christie Roadster S+10K-M (3DLP, 11,500 lumens, SXGA+) projectors. Two S+20Ks were used to cover each side of the façade with the main part divided vertically into two areas, each one covered by one S+20K and one S+10K-M.
The projectors were installed eight meters high on scaffold structures with a throw distance of approximately 26 meters. The video, lights and sound were synchronized using a Watchout multimedia processor, which also managed the geometric correction and edge blending. The total number of pixels in the projection was 4720 by 2160.
The video screened on the façade lasted seven minutes and contained fragments of the movie and promotional contents from the sponsors (General Motors, Hasbro, Oreo, Paramount and the Calima shopping mall). The projection mapping display played four times each night over three days, drawing an average of 350 spectators per show.
“We have been working with Christie for the last five years because it is one of the world’s best and most reliable brands,” explained Joaquín Gutiérrez, CEO of Big Video. “And, in this particular case, the equipment, as always, ensured faultless performance and gave us the sense of security we were looking for. The feedback we got from the client was overwhelmingly positive and the audience was completely wowed by the mapping.”
Looking at the main challenges involved in organizing the event, Joaquín Gutiérrez, CEO, Big Video, highlighted the tight schedule for setting up the equipment (one day) and the weather conditions, given that the show was open air. “But the projectors are so easy to handle and they perform so well even in tough weather conditions the mapping was a resounding success,” Gutiérrez concluded.
Jaime López, CEO at LPX Digital, pointed out: “Launching the movie ‘Transformers: Age of Extinction’ was the end result of five months of hard work and it proved to be a really interesting experience because the message was conveyed in a mapping, which had never been used before in Colombia for promoting a movie. On a façade spanning 65 meters, it was absolutely crucial to get the image right for these ‘Transformers’ to ensure a big public impact, and I can safely say that the result was truly spectacular.”
