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Rosco at the Winter Olympics
With 200 million people watching on TV, those Colours on the gobo projections better be right!
One of the enduring images of the Vancouver winter Olympics is sure to be the sails of light show, entitled "look at the games". The show, which takes place nightly, is projected on the five 90-foot sails atop the Canada place building and is often used as an iconic background for television images around the world.
The gobos used for many of the projections were created by moment factory and manufactured by Rosco. The back story of this successful collaboration between the designers and the manufacturer is a useful case history for anyone involved in custom gobo production.
The designers chose to use custom made glass gobos in martin 1200 projectors. But they were restricted to using an exact match of the official colours of the winter Olympics and to design and produce them so they fit the triangular surfaces of the sails, with no image spill off the sails.
Rosco manufactured more than 40 colour glass gobos for this project, as well as nearly a dozen black and white glass gobos. The company's facility and personnel were specially suited for projects like these because Rosco is the only gobo manufacturer to colour coat the glass in its own facility, and create the dichroics.
Here's how Anne Hunter, who supervised this project for Rosco, tells the story: "The interesting part was the colour scheme they sent us. There could be little to no fluctuation as we were told these were the official Olympic colours - combinations and gradations of blues and greens.
"Gradations of different greens are sometimes difficult to achieve in the gobo colour mixing process. Greens can be a hard colour to hit. The combination of blues could also be difficult. However, because we have created different variations of cyan, magenta, and yellow glass for OEM purposes, we were able to pick the proper CMY combinations that would mix well to match the original art.
"By having a cyan available that we designed specifically for an OEM customer for example, we knew we could match the blues and all the gradients within it exactly, in combination with our percentage decisions within the art previous to going to etch. We had a choice of Rosco-created colour for mixing. Our expertise in colour, allowed us to come up with the proper combinations for both the art colour mix percentages and the chosen dichroic colour variation of the cyan, magenta and yellow. That produced an exact match to the Olympic colours.
"The Martin 1200 which would project the gobos uses a blue lamp source. That was also taken into consideration, providing clues for the precise adjustments of the art colour and the etch process. This, in combination with the CMY glass we had chosen, would directly affect the green and bring it in line to match the colour scheme upon projection.
"What made this particular job even more special was the short time frame involved. As the art was created, it was immediately e-mailed over for creation of the colour gobos, sometimes for same day shipping. For the final job - over 30 multi colour originals and 10 black and white high resolution glass.
"This isn't a case where the art was in hand or previously created. They would create the art, send it to us, move on to the next set of art pieces. By Thursday we were finalising last colour and black and white pieces, to ship out for Friday, delivery to Vancouver for installation that weekend. Mutual cooperation was key here. They set their schedule in co-ordination with our production schedule for an effective quick turnaround."
19th February 2010
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