This event saw the artist take to a stage in the square with a special remix of her hit single Starships being played live to a big audience with flash mob style dancers, pounding sound effects and a 200ft LED wall.
Bluman enabled the production to take over the American Eagle LED tower in Times Square to create a hero screen which would form the centrepiece for the event with striking content designed to move in time with the song. Other screens around the square were taken over to relay camera feeds from the live event as well as brand messages for the launch of the Nokia Lumia 900. Super high resolution CGI content was created for the screen by UK production company Glassworks.
The screen featured a live countdown for hours before, drawing a crowd of 30,000 into the square. During the remix, a selection of graphics was played with cascading water; a graphic equaliser and live action content as the crowd were filmed as part of the video, which has generated over 1m hits on You Tube already.
JD O'Lone associate director at Mission comments, "We worked closely with Bluman and Glassworks to create a concept which would combine a brand activation with a legacy film and would have viral impact to extend the impression beyond the people experiencing it firsthand."
Bluman planned a series of media servers, switchers and controllers to enable the show to be vision mixed live on site and to capture the excitement of the crowd on the big screens.
This included eight Hippotizer V3 HD media servers which were all running dual in dual mode with full redundancy from DVI switchers and programmed using a Road Hog Full Boar. The variety of different sizes and formats of screens in Times Square meant that Bluman had to specify different formats for the content production and closely manage the distribution of the content using a Christie Spyder to create a realtime visualisation as content was played. Live feeds were also coming in from Matt Askem in the OB truck which had to be manipulated and framed appropriately for the screens instantly.
Pod Bluman, managing director of Bluman Associates reports, "In addition to a complicated media streaming system, we had to run fibre optic cable to all the screens covering four blocks in Times Square. This was a highly time pressured installation in one of the most densely populated and highly visited areas in the world. We have lots of experience of working in complicated multi-agency environments and delivering technically complex solutions that involve a high level of collaboration and negotiation, so this was the perfect job in our eyes."
(Jim Evans)
