The Staro Riga Festival of Light is the biggest in the region and this year's event also celebrated Riga as the joint European Capital of Culture 2014. System integrator Solaris, based in Saint Petersburg and Moscow, supplied WATCHOUT systems and hardware for projection mapping on the facades of the Astor Riga Hotel, Congress Centre, St Peter's Church and the Academy of Arts during the five-day festival.
"We were brought in to realize the technical aspects of the shows in the city based on our many years of experience working on architectural mapping projects around the world," says Anton Rodionov, video engineer and project manager at Solarisvideo. "Our background proved invaluable as the team had a hectic schedule setting up and fine-tuning installations in different parts of the city, contending with both the climate and the architectural challenges."
At the Astor Riga Hotel, Solarisvideo programmed and installed a Dataton WATCHOUT system running on four Barco HDX-W20flex projectors. The Riga Congress Centre projections used content driven by WATCHOUT to three Barco HDF-W26 projectors. At St Peter's Church, a WATCHOUT system played out via a Barco HDQ-2K40 and a HDX-W20. The elegant Latvian Academy of Arts building featured WATCHOUT, Barco HDF-W26 and HDX-W20 projectors. All in all, a lot of projection power was ready to roll as soon as dusk fell on November 14.
"We have used WATCHOUT for different-scale events and appreciate the user-friendly interface," says Anton Rodionov, Solarisvideo. "The flexibility, scalability and high stability in performance give a sense of confidence which leads to a comfortable and easy working process. Our project experience in Riga became a perfect example of all those qualities."
(Jim Evans)
