Located in the Chinese capital's National Conference Centre, adjacent to globally renowned Olympic venues such as the Bird's Nest stadium and Water Cube, Old Beijing Gets Moving takes as its inspiration A Glance Round Old Beijing - a celebrated panorama of the city as it was in the 1930s, originally created as an extended scrolled image by the painter Wang Daguan.
Thanks to Watchout's ability to seamlessly blend and synchronise the images of 56 digital video projectors, Daguan's original painting has been brought to life as a spectacular animated video in which up to a thousand ancient buildings including temples, castles, city walls, theatres, shops and people's homes are enhanced by moving images of the people who once inhabited them as they go about their daily lives -walking, talking, working, shopping, playing and even, in one case, getting married.
On entering the exhibition, visitors are guided around in front of a custom-built projection screen that measures three metres high and is over 228m long. Along its 'journey',the screen takes a number of right-angle turns, allowing visitors to view some parts of the animation in parallel with one another, and giving them a fresh perspective each time they turn a corner.
"The theme of the exhibition is 'Watch Old Beijing, Love New Beijing'," explains Kenneth Cheung of AudioVisual Technique, Dataton's local partner. "Many of the buildings represented in Wang Daguan's original painting are long gone, so the idea was to apply new technology in a way that would bring them back to life for today's generation.
"The creative team responsible for Old Beijing Gets Moving is the same one that created the acclaimed Riverside Scene in the Chinese Pavilion of the Shanghai World Expo. We thought that was an extraordinary achievement of digital programming and animation, but this new Beijing exhibition outshines it not just in terms of scale but also in terms of creativity, artistic depth and sheer ambition."
Audio Visual Technique supplied the Watchout licences to local systems integrator An Heng Group, which designed the exhibition's AV infrastructure. As well as its multiple image-blending, Watchout was chosen for its geometry correction capabilities -essential given the many corners in the projection map - and for its centralised control features which allow the whole 'show' to be triggered and run automatically from the Exhibition's Crestron control system.
Fredrik Svahnberg, marketing director at Dataton, observes, "Our partners in Asia continue to astound us with the scale and ambition of their work, and Old Beijing Gets Moving is a perfect example. It is hard to imagine a multimedia installation of this scale being accomplished with anything other than Watchout, and we are delighted to have been the supplier of choice for such a spectacular and historically important project."
(Jim Evans)
