Amongst the symbolic locations selected for the 2013 editon of the festival - which includes the Loujniki Olympic complex, the Tsaritsyno Park and the Manege - there is a particularly iconic one that evokes all the cultural influence from the Russian capital: The Bolshoi Theatre.
Cosmo AV was tasked with elaborating the content projected on the façade of this building, which acted as a screen, playing the audiovisual creations from the Cosmo AV teams.
Onlookers witnessed two dream-like shows which lasted for a total of 12 minutes, with mixed video and computer generated images, supported by a soundtrack revisiting masterpieces from some of the world famous classical music composers, such as Rachmaninov and Tchaïkovski.
Antoine Géré, Cosmo AV content director, and responsible for the Bolshoi projections, explains, "Our goal was to create a genuine emotion for the audience, and in order to achieve this, we decided to mix computer-generated 3D images with real content. We took a high speed camera to a rehearsal dance hall in Paris and shot a classical dancer in HD so we could reproduce all the grace and delicacy of a ballerina, from the gestures linked to the preparation, to the dancing movement on stage. During the show, we will also be showcasing reflected effects, as a reference to those mirrors used in the rehearsal halls."
The second show, entitled All Aboard, invited the audience to travel across Russia and discover its cultural and historical treasures, with the railway acting as a connecting thread. People will board the famous Moscow underground, before running across the steppes of Russia. They will then become part of the conquest of space, before ending their journey with the train ride onto the Bolshoi stage.
The production work was supervised by Pierre-Yves Toulot and José Cristiani, artistic directors for this project and both founders of Cosmo AV.
Says Pierre-Yves Toulot, "In order to tell a meaningful story, you need to create a true visual and sonic experience. We like to mix different materials such as video images, matte painting and computer generated images so the visual aspect is richer and more creative. We wanted people's imagination to be fully immersed, so we used sound effects engineers in studios. We went as far as capturing real sounds from the Moscow underground to improve the sensation of reality."
ETC Russia handled all projections during the festival, with the technical help of ETC Paris to install a total of 18 Christie Roadster S+22K-J 3 Chip DLP projectors in a mixture of portrait and landscape mode, allowing a continuous image of 62m long by 41m high. Both the content and sound were managed by ETC's multimedia control platform Onlyview.
(Jim Evans)
