CPL Invests in projectors for Arcadia London
- Details
The vibrant two day alt.culture festival, music and performance extravaganza celebrated the 10th anniversary of the birth of the Arcadia concept, and was staged in London’s Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park with the famed Spider at the hub of the performance action.
CPL has been involved with Arcadia since 2013 when the 50 tonne Spider - the conceptual brainchild of Pip Rush and Bert Cole crafted from reimagined military hardware and other recycled industrial waste - first landed at Glastonbury festival.
For the last few UK appearances of the arachnid, CPL has been part of a dedicated production team delivering crisp, detailed projections onto both sides of the three giant legs, which are fundamental structural elements of this awesome 360 degree visual and sonic spectacle.
The new projectors arrived just in time at CPL’s West Midlands warehouse for the London event, which was built around Arcadia’s Metamorphosis experience, a dynamic combination of ambitious engineering, acrobatics, stunning visuals and sonic excellence that WOWed everyone in Olympic Park. The festival also included a sizzling line-up of other electronic talent, with all the main action taking place in and around the Spider.
CPL’s team was project managed by George Oakey who was joined by Jack Sykes and Robin Emery. They worked closely with Arcadia’s production manager Dorian Cameron-Marlow and Tom Wall who co-ordinated all the video mapping.
Fitted with TLD 2.8 - 4.5 lenses, each projected image was mapped precisely onto the front and back of the Spider’s legs via Arcadia’s AI media server which stored and replayed all the video content.
The projectors were located on six custom weatherised scaffolding towers built around the perimeter of the field-of-play / performance space as in previous years, with a throw distance of approximately 40m.
Having these new Barco machines enabled them to achieve a lot more intensity than in previous shows, using the same amount of projectors!
“There was a noticeable difference in the quality and feel of the projections on this show,” commented George, who has worked on previous UK Arcadia shows where they used conventional lamped rather than laser projectors.
(Jim Evans)
