Conceived by the British event production agency David Atkins Enterprises on a commission for the Organising Committee of the Pan Arab Games, the opening ceremony entitled Journey to Light relied on the expertise of its French technical services provider ETC and the Christie Roadster series of projectors purpose-designed for event production.
Christie's partner ETC is an experienced event manager thoroughly familiar with the creative challenges David Atkins Enterprises can pose: its project manager Patrice Bouqueniau describes the opening ceremony of the 12th Pan Arab Games as "a totally original installation, even more ambitious than the one we did in Vancouver in 2010 . . . This time, too, we chose Christie projectors - partly for their unequalled illuminating power, but also for their outstanding blacks and their unrivalled dependability".
Two towers were put up on above the stands opposite the display area, to cover the whole of the Khalifa Stadium which at nightfall would be turned into a giant screen. In groups of three, 42 Christie Roadster HD18Ks on one tower and 36 Christie Roadster S+20Ks on the other had the job of lighting the ground and producing the spectacular 3D projections, while another eight Christie Roadster S+20Ks (four in each tower) were aimed at the central stage constructed beside the stands.
"The ground was covered in white geotextile, making a giant screen 136m long by 72m wide," said Patrice Bouqueniau. It was a real 5280 x 3264 pixel challenge to cope with the constraints imposed by the grandiose set design; but that wasn't all. The configuration of Christie projectors deployed by the ETC technicians needed as many as twelve matrix overlays in some parts of the image, all modulated using Christie's Twist technology.
ETC for its part relied on its media diffusion system Onlyview to map video according to the 3D projection surfaces. "Onlyview made it possible to use the same Christie projectors to project the images onto the flat surfaces as well as onto the 3D ones," said Patrice Bouqueniau.
For the matrices, ETC chose to use 4:3 and 16:9 projectors using Christie Roadster S+20Ks for the one and HD18Ks for the other. "Set design constraints are absolute: we chose to use these two types of matrix because we couldn't get the same pitch angle from both towers to cover the whole of the projection surface," he said.
(Jim Evans)
