Building projections seem to have grown almost exponentially in use and popularity recently. Part video art and – increasingly – part advertising, the projections utilize surveying tech, 3D animation tools and digital projection techniques to create immersive shows for audiences at building venues around the world. Late last year, Drive Productions in London orchestrated a dazzling projection onto London’s Millbank Tower on the shores of the Thames, set to music from DJ Deadmau5. We talk to Drive CEO Ben Fender about this show, as well as other projection mapping work his company completed for Ralph Lauren and HP.
– Above: watch a video of Drive’s Nokia Lumia 800 projections onto Millbank Tower in London.
fxg: Can you talk about the history of Drive Productions?
Fender: We’ve been going since 2004, and prior to that we were an event production company in a different incarnation. Our real background is in circus touring and rock ‘n’ roll concerts. By 2001 we were involved in live shows and introducing lots of event technologies. It was a great business, but we did also find that we needed much more technical support for what we were doing than we were able to get from the production companies we were working with. So we went into developing our own production wing that enabled us to experiment with lighting and projection and just generally pushing the boundaries of event tech.
Over the last couple of years, that’s become a much more central part of the business. We started using projection to map small objects and would play with it from an experimental perspective, all the while thinking that it needed to be done on a much grander scale to really make an impact. A year and a half ago we were approached by Bombay Sapphire to do their ‘Project Your Imagination’ campaign. At the same time we were then approached by Polo Ralph Lauren to help launch their e-commerce site in the UK, and it went from there.
fxg: Just in general, can you talk about how building projections work?
Fender: Well for us, we worked with United Visual Artists and their d3 system to help us create these projections. We wrote a bunch of new code that would allow us to completely understand the stage in a 3D environment so that we could then point a pixel of light anywhere within that environment. Then there’s also the media server that allows us to run four HD projectors that can composite to the facade of a building.
– Above: watch the making of the Nokia Lumia projections.
fxg: Can you talk about how the Nokia Lumia piece came together initially?
Fender: We were approached by Nokia’s PR agency to come up with a video mapping concept for the Lumia handset, and obviously luma means light so it seemed to fit very well. We have a director here and creative team, plus an animation and CG team. So we would essentially write a script that then is just a written piece put in front of our clients that gives a flavor or treatment of how we’d like to present and what the ideas were.
It was informed by the technology focus of the handset and the fact that we were cutting the show to Deadmau5, who is a very techno kind of DJ. So we wanted something that was both informed by the architecture of the building and the type of music. That led us into this almost Blade Runner – 1960s – future vibe. I think a real signature of the work we’re doing at the moment is about building transformation as well, where we actually use the 3D model of the building that we can then manipulate and distort. There are some mapping shows where the building falls down or the windows move, but we’re much more into moving the architecture itself, such as the corkscrew effect and big block movements – these seem to have an amazing ‘wow’ factor on the audience.
fxg: How was the building for the Nokia projections chosen?
Fender: There were three buildings we were looking at, and they were all equal contenders. We needed a building that was prominent on the London skyline and in central town. The feedback from Millbank, the owners of the building, was very positive, so we went with that. The building actually didn’t tick all the boxes in terms of the way it was made – it’s mainly glass and it’s got blue and black panels on the facade, so when you shine light on it there’s very little reflectivity. But luckily they were prepared to allow us to cover the entire facade of the building in vinyl, so we did that to give us the reflectivity we needed, and that was a pretty amazing task in itself, really. A 32 story tower in that part of London is really an amazing canvas to project onto.
– Above: watch Drive’s projection mapping showreel.
fxg: What’s then the process of surveying or measuring the building?
Fender: The first step is to do a Leica laser survey of the building. We use a Leica tripod laser system, which bounces a series of laser shots of all the key facade details. That gives us a point cloud, which is then translated into a 3D AutoCAD drawing of the building. It’s a similar survey that architects or surveyors do which is accurate to within five millimeters.
We then take that model and put it into our media server system and that becomes the ‘stage’, as it were. We make some slight distortions to that model so that we understand the perspective that the audience and cameras will see the building from, and at that point we have a template.
Pretty much then we go into a similar process you’d use for doing TV or film or animation, but instead of having a flat screen you have a 3D template to build all our content around. Once we have that 3D model we can break that up into all types of transformational geometry and when you project that building back on itself you can get the impression that the building is actually moving.
fxg: What tools are you using for the animation?
Fender: We create the animated sequences in 3D using Maya, Cinema 4D and 3ds Max. They’re sent to our renderfarm and rendered at extremely high resolution. The Nokia show is effectively six cinema screens, so the resolution on offer is huge. We used a Flame to composite the elements for the final picture. That goes back into the media server which delivers the images to the projectors for the final show.
fxg: Can you talk about the projection system?
Fender: We use a d3 media server. It has an amazing warp function that we helped to write the code for. This lets us really fine-tune the picture so it can fit the architecture perfectly. The servers can talk to four HD projectors. We had 16 FLM HD20 Barcos on the Nokia project. They were sighted 300 meters away across the other side of the Thames with 8:1 lenses. From that distance you end up losing quite a lot of distance even in a powerful projector, so we overlaid each image on top of each other eight times to achieve the brightness we required. So you can imagine there’s a grid and we put one grid up from one projector, then you get another projector and lay it on top and line up that grid – and you carry on doing that and each time you add a projector you get a third more brightness.
– Above: watch a recent projection mapping show Drive completed for Hewlett Packard in New York.
fxg: What’s the set up time for a typical show like Nokia?
Fender: The show was on a Monday and we went in with the projectors on the Thursday before. Because we were in a dis-used building they all had to be carried up eight flights of stairs. There were eight projector arrays on floor seven and floor eight of the building. They’re all rigged to be absolutely fixed in position. That first process takes 24 hours, with obviously all the line-up done at night.
The second night we then did the content line up where we calibrate all our grids and managed the soft edge blend and made sure all the images are overlaying on each other. We also ran some short sequences of the final content then which tells us whether we need to make any adaptations on the final day before the show. Back in the Flame suite we might adjust some contrast or certain levels or grade within the picture so that we can counteract any loss in the picture or effect the building is having on the picture.
fxg: How do you do an effective test of the final product before you even get out to the building?
Fender: The media server we use allows us to do a preview. Once we have the model in there, we can then position the building and the projectors and the angle they’re hitting the building. We can then run the sequences we’ve created as a preview and the media server will tell us whether there’s going to be any kinks or break-up in the image because of the shape of the building. If you were just running say a projection of a picture of someone’s face onto the building, it might end up looking really distorted on the building. So we can warp or break the image up – on the computer it will look strange but finally on the night we end up with a clean image.
fxg: What kinds of things are working in your opinion for building projections – what are the most impactful kinds of animation do you think?
Fender: Anything where you take the audience back to experiencing the building itself and then manipulating and transforming the building – we’re finding that they work the best. We’re using those as transitions between scenes. Those big transitions where the building is fully manipulated we’re seeing as being the ‘4D thing’. They’re actually less complicated to do than doing some of the other work compositing.
For the Ralph Lauren projection, for example, we shot all the polo ponies on greenscreen and then we had to composite out all of that action and then create a 3D environment in which all the horses had a relationship with the architecture. They needed to look like they were floating in space at the front of the building. So getting live action to have the effect that it’s not on the building, but in front, is something we’re looking to explore at the moment.
– Above: watch the making of Drive’s Ralph Lauren projections.
fxg: How big a deal is fidelity and resolution in building projections?
Fender: It all depends on location. If your audience is 200 meters away, say, from a great big building like Millbank, then the resolution or the pixel size can be relatively big, because you have that distance. If they’re much closer, say within 20 meters, then we need to make the resolution that much finer. We’ll adjust the amount of projectors and final resolution and make a final UV map based on the environment we’re in. That might be done to a three or four millimeter pixel up to 40 millimeters wide, which is what we did for Millbank.
fxg: Where is building projection heading as a medium, do you think?
Fender: Well, the main visual treat that we’re exploring at the moment is opening the building up and going into the building and finding this whole world that lives in this medium. It’s all about optical illusions, and people enjoy that – being taken into what seems like a very solid part of architectural infrastructure. The reason we think this works is – if you look at a building and like the architecture you don’t always know why you like it, but you do like it. This plays with the same mentality where you’re changing architecture into something else and reforming people’s reality, and I think that’s why it’s having such a dramatic effect in the world of video art and advertising.
Interesting article. Thanks for covering this topic as there is more and more demand for these types of projects.