RFH Overture
CLIENT:
Southbank Centre
EVENT:
Overture Weekend
LOCATION:
Royal Festival Hall, London UK
CAPACITY:
1800 performers and 200,000 visitors over 2 days
THE BRIEF:
In June 2007, the Royal Festival Hall on London’s south bank re-opened its doors after three years of extensive refurbishment. To mark the occasion, they organized the ‘Overture Weekend’ which consisted of 48 hours of almost non-stop events, involving some 1800 performers and artists. We were approached with the brief of re-launching the building by ‘wrapping it with imagery’ from dusk till dawn over the two nights.
DESCRIPTION:
Using eight of the biggest and brightest projectors available in the UK as our light source, and the great façade on Festival Square as our canvas, we tell the story of the building - its history, its audiences and the many thousands of performances that have taken place within, since first opening its doors to the public in 1951.
GaiaNova co-ordinated a truly international team of audiovisual artists, to produce a total of eight 15-minute films, which ran throughout the night over the course of the weekend. We scoured the archives of the Royal Festival Hall, the British Film Institute and a number of private collections, securing the rights to sample recordings. To this archive material we gave a contemporary feel, commissioning different artists to remix the footage, each applying their own visual style.
Tying each section together was a cinematic soundtrack created by Jules Shapter. The final body of work had a total running time of two hours, with each film being a 4-screen composition rendered at greater than HD resolution. On both nights, we performed the whole show live, playing back directly from our custom media servers.
ARTISTS FEATURED:
- Design and Curation - Artnership
- Analog oil images - Laborg
- V.J Spetto. - Video Design
- Sumit Sarkar - Live Animation
- Clips of Border Line - Alex Chanden
- Curation and Design - Showskills
- Video clips and animation -Obsidian Graphics
- Video Textures - Ryoichi Kurokawa
- Sound design - Jules Shapter
- Virtual Guest Book - Maki from Tagtool
SERVICES PROVIDED:
- Event Consultancy and Pre-production
- Project Management
- Production Management
- Technical Support
- Archive research and collation
- Transport Logistics
- Story boarding
- Video Editing
- Artist management
- Stage Management
Photos provided by Jules Shapter and Jonny Ladd