The Portsmouth Guildhall, home to Portsmouth City Council, was opened in 1890. It was bombed to a shell in 1941, and reopened after extensive rebuilding in 1959. Measuring approximately 60m wide by 40m tall, E/T/C UK's projections stretched across the entire front fascia of the white stone structure.
E//T//C UK was approached by Heather Todd from the Council's Arts Services Department, who was aware of their work on Buckingham Palace. She thought that projection would be the ideal medium to produce a big WOW factor at the end of their commemorative show. "On the first site visit it was immediately obvious that the Guildhall would make a perfect projection surface" says E//T//C UK's Ross Ashton. This visit also established that they could locate the projectors on the top of the new council offices building opposite the Guildhall, which was also ideal. They performed a camera obscura survey to establish the exact masking and perspective correction needed to fit the imagery to the building.
E//T//C UK supplied four PIGI 6kW projectors fitted with double rotating scrollers. Three were used to cover the length of the building and one for the 20m tower. Ashton asked Paul Chatfield to design and create the images, which he sourced from Portsmouth Council, Portsmouth Museum archives, and the National Archive. He montaged over 300 images to make the final scrolling artwork. Chatfield developed six different two-minute scrolling themed backdrops, deliberately choosing more abstract imagery from the War era, as opposed to newsreel and graphical footage. Much of it was 'home front' images and artwork of the time, and the grand finale - accompanied by a hearty rendition of 'Rule Britannia' from the singers onstage - featured scenes of Britannia and a specially shaped Union Jack washing across the building to great effect.
The show was programmed by E/T/C UK's Sam McLaren using a PIGI OnlyCue system, and the control position was on the 5th floor offices of the council buildings opposite.
(Lee Baldock)
