TDC pushes boundaries at Vivid Sydney
Published: ASIA
AUSTRALIA: The Technical Direction Company (TDC) was involved in the recent sixth annual Vivid Sydney Festival, providing core technology and services to Destination NSW for the ambitious light-based event. The company provided a sizeable complement of Barco projectors, Coolux Pandoras Box media servers and projection tower infrastructure. Sound equipment was also supplied for a unique presentation allowing a surface to be mapped using the human voice.
‘Vivid Sydney is a great challenge for our company, the scale of this event is enormous in regard to projection technology required to bring it all together,’ commented Michael Hassett, TDC’s MD. ‘This year over 50 Barco projectors will be deployed in total, ranging from the brightest projector in the world, the HDQ-2K40, along with Barco HDF-W26 and FLM-R22+ projectors. This is a projection technology feat and not something that any company globally could pull together easily. We’re proud to be working with the great team at Destination NSW again this year, and we look forward to the continued success of Vivid Sydney.’
The presentations on display at the festival included Dichroic Dimensions, Gamma World, Urban Tree Project, Spirit of Patyrgarang, and Play Me; all of which featured projected light shows onto a variety of unique objects. Kain Jones, special projects manager for TDC talked through the process of designing an installation on this scale.
‘As Vivid Sydney grows, new buildings and locations are added, so initially we spend considerable time analysing which technology is best-aligned to meet the artists’ vision,’ explained Ms Jones. ‘We get involved from the outset in installation design, mapping the buildings to enable the designers to create content specific to the outline of those buildings. We then work on optimal locations for projector placement, media server selection, lens selection and the number of projectors required to meet specific brightness output for each installation.’
The project for TDC heralded a number of technical and creative firsts; including an installation where artist Ross Manning collaborated with the artist collective The Digital Shamans to allow visitors to projection map the surface of the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia using just their voice.
‘There’ll be two microphones on a slightly raised platform. As the audience uses their voice to interact with the installation, various hidden layers of visuals and soundscapes will be revealed based on pitch,’ explained Michael K Chin of The Digital Shamans. ‘TDC are an amazing company with the technical know how and equipment to cope with the subtleties in our work. Especially with the HD video taken of dichroic filters producing subtle gradients in tones and colour shifts, strong contrast and vivid colour.’
The installation for the Urban Tree Project, also proved to be particularly complex as the projections were synced with a laser light show.
‘This project had unique technical challenges, so the natural choice for us was TDC,’ said Nicolas Tory, Ample creative director. ‘Ample designed a complex 3D mapping solution in collaboration with the TDC team. They were highly professional, providing projection design solutions for a cylindrical architecture screen with extreme focal planes.’
‘The shape of the structure was great to work on. We decided that the best solution was to map the projection to the curves of the building using Coolux Pandoras Box Media Servers,’ commented Pete Lynn, TDC’s media server specialist. ‘We’re very happy with the results.’