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The Right Blend for 2012
The walk-through project illustrating London’s bid to host the 2012 Olympic Games was wholly funded by Ballymore Properties and conceived and led by PR agency Fleishman-Hillard on their behalf.
Blend - headed by Daz Jamieson - was asked onboard to oversee the installation and running of the technical infrastructure inside the Experience by production company VIBE who worked closely with RPMC to stage the event for two weeks each in London’s Trafalgar Square and Canary Wharf.
Jamieson and VIBE’s Adam Proto designed and specified the ‘Make You Feel Proud’ live show running in the main auditorium and the presentation in the map room of the structure. Jamieson’s overall Experience show design utilised two new products distributed exclusively Blend in the UK.
Fog Screen, a bespoke effect devised by its eponymous Finnish manufacturers, was used to create an invisible surface for a series of projections in the doorway/entrance dividing the Structure’s two rooms. Fog Screen is an ultrasonically cracked water screen buffered between two laminated air flows. Special projections for this element of the Experience were produced by Blend and edited by Richard Bagshaw and Kate Perring of Digital Insanity.
Eyeliner, a polymer film with a coating of a single atom layer of aluminium made by Musion GmbH, was used by Jamieson to produce a modern Pepper’s Ghost effect within the structure, set between the two video screens in the structure’s second (back) room. Here, Olympic gold medallist Matthew Pinsent ‘appeared’ from nowhere – real sized, 3D and extremely lifelike - to introduce the ‘Make You Feel Proud’ show.
In the front room, Blend supplied 11 plasma screens of varying sizes. These were linked to street maps of London across the entire floor, highlighting certain areas and illustrating how these would change should London win the Bid. They were fed with content from DVD storage devices.
Lighting in the front room consisted of Martin MAC 2000s and 600s, supplied to Blend by PRG, and used to boost the light levels towards the end of the day and when the weather became dull as well as for special presentations. Sound was delivered through Sound Tubes rigged above each plasma screen for highly directional ‘spotlights’ of audio.
In the dark room running the ‘Make You Feel Proud’ video, Jamieson designed a five-ringed trussing configuration for the roof – mimicking the Olympic rings, and enlisted lighting designer Mikey Howard to create a groovy lightshow to accompany the video. Utilised kit included MAC 600s, Pulsar Chroma LED fixtures, MR16s and lots of Egg-strobes. The show was programmed onto an Avolites Diamond 4 triggered by timecode from an audio signal – the first time a D4 console has been used with timecode.
Sound was also the first installation and commercial application of Funktion One’s new R1 and F88 speaker enclosures. “Quality and detail was sonically imperative,” explains Jamieson, “Having worked with Funktion One products and people many times, so they were the obvious choice of audio suppliers.” The system also utilised Funktion One’s Mini Bass subs and their latest F1 amps and control. Sound sources were stored on a 24 channel Fostex hard drive controller, which sent time code to the lighting desk via a Media Sonic HD player. The D4 then squirted DMX to a Hippotizer digital media server that supplied the side screen video.
Video content for the 3D effect on the main screen in this room was co-ordinated by Blend via their Italian office, and post-produced by Sunrise Events in Bologna.
All projection – video screens, Fog Screen, Pepper’s Ghost, etc – was delivered through the latest Panasonic 1 and 3-chip DLP machines, one 7700 and three 5500s supplied by Nexnix Horsham.
This was the perfect opportunity Jamieson had been looking for to showcase the fusion of the new technologies he has been planning to introduce to the UK for sometime now. All the technologies worked perfectly together and certainly produced the WOW factor the client was after.
In picture: Blend’s Daz Jamieson meets the Pepper’s Ghost of Sir Matthew Pinsent.
3rd May 2005
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