unused_21.swf

ScreenPlay

EVENT:

ScreenPlay

LOCATION:

The Clore Ballroom - The Royal Festival Hall

DURATION:

Morning till late night - 5 weeks

THE BRIEF:

The Southbank Centre commisioned us to create video installation for the Royal Festival Halls' Clore Ballroom. The brief was to create a living wall of video, some 30 metres long, which would reflect the diversity of the Royal Festival Hall's artistic programming and open it up to a wider audience. The installation was to run from morning till midnight, every day for a period of five weeks.

DESCRIPTION:

GaiaNova designed, developed, installed and manged the entire installation, from both a technical and creative perspective. We specified the projection hardware, which consisted of six 6500 lumen LCD video projectors, we designed and oversaw the manufacture of a bespoke wrap-around projection screen and we designed and built three custom media servers to manage the show content. With each media server driving two video projectors at their native XGA resolution, we created a seamless canvas over 6000 pixels wide.

Running the length of the end and side walls of the Clore Ballroom the screen filled the space stretching from floor to ceiling, the sheer scale and intensity of the installation meant we were able to dramatically transform the space from one moment to the next, entirely through the use of moving image.

Additionally, we relayed a number of live events through the ScreenPlay system. Performances that had been sold out many months beforehand were transmitted live from upstairs in the Royal Festival Hall and redisplayed for the general public to enjoy for free. We were able to add feeds from a number of HD cameras into the overall ScreenPlay mix. When the Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela performed to a packed auditorium, some two or three thousand people squeezed on to the Ballroom floor to watch the screens and a carnival atmosphere ensued. Several people, who experienced the show both in the auditorium and on the Ballroom floor comented that the ScreenPlay experience was actually "better than being there".

For this installation, we based our media servers on software called Resolume Avenue 3, an application so new it only came out of Beta testing the two days before our official launch. Cutting edge indeed! We were in regular contact with the developers during the project, and certainly gave their software a good road test - the media servers ran practically 24/7 for the whole five weeks. We are delighted to say the whole system perfomed very reliably indeed.

 

Artists Featured

The Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra
London Philharmonic Orchestra
Philharmonia Orchestra
The Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment
Lambeth Music Service
b.supreme
Dare 2 Dance
Voice Lab
Dan Zanes & Friends
Luzmira Zerpa
In Harmony Project
Angie Reed
Röyksopp
Peaches
Jodie Harsh
The Cock n Bull Kid
I Gospel
Hackney Empire
Rex the Dog
ZunZunIgui
Shamus Dark
Ether Festival
Joy Singers Choir