Gadgetory

it's pretty hard to think of the Sydney skyline without picturing the Sydney Opera House this year as part of vivid festival 2014 UK company 59 productions are responsible for lighting the sails and bathing it in animations and visuals every single night I'm Lexy CBDs foreseen it let's go behind the scenes and take a look at some of the technics making it happen we're using 14 Christi 20k projectors mounted on the ferry port office at the Opera House they are converged multiple units on to each of four areas on the sails so we've broken the the Opera House down into four channels basically and we're using multiple projects on each of those channels each one of those channels is controlled by a desk Tom watch out server again with a central control system which manages that play out to all of those machines so it's a fairly standard linear playback system with quite a lot of complex work on the content to really make him up to the Opera House so I've never been to Sydney until this week but one of the processes that we employ with a lot of our work whether it's in a theatre and opera house of architectural mapping on the outside of the building is that we actually create a real-world 3d model in our studio so for Sydney we had a 3d print made of an architectural e accurate 1 to 300 model which we then projection mapped in the studio so we were able to create a very accurate representation albeit much much smaller so that when we arrived here in fact 24 hours after the plane touched down we were looking at images on the side of the Opera House it was very pleasing to see how close they were to our kind of real world visualization that we've been able to make so on the one hand we we work with those 3d models tactile things that you can move around and check different reject triangles and so on but we also pre visualize in CG so we're using cinema 4d to actually move around the Opera House to create kind of virtual shots and virtual moving shots together since what it might look like as you travel around the harbour because well as creating a lot of 2d 3d two-and-a-half d animation work we've combined that with a lot of live-action filming so we've after we had our 1 to 300 architectural model made we then took a cast of that and created a number of kind of replica models and a number of different materials so we use plaster gel wax wax our minyan various different materials and we then filmed those at 4k resolution hundred twenty frames or 240 frames a second high-speed in order to create sort of what we're calling organic effects so things like water running down the outside of the opera house like super heating the copper version of it like smashing the glass wax version like melting the wax version like hurling paint at some of the plaster versions so while was this kind of backbone of digital animation we've composited that together with a large amount of live action which gives it a kind of hopefully much more tactile much more visceral feeling and there are moments when you're not quite sure if there's a lighting effect on the opera house or whether it's projection or whether we're somehow messing with the materials of the actual surface even though many of the visitors might not know about the tech behind the scenes there's no doubt that the finished result of lighting the sails is something special