Mckeown, who also lectures in post-production and animation at Teesside University, was originally invited by the directors of the National Sculpture Factory and Create Ireland to meet with them in Cork to discuss the project. He proposed that they create an outdoor projection event to be held on Culture Night 2015.
Funding for the event came from Teesside University, and Ignite - a partnership of the Arts Council, Arts & Disability Ireland, Cork City Council, Galway City and County Councils, and Mayo County Council, whose aim is to showcase the talents of people with disabilities, including artists and performers.
During Spring of 2014, Simon Mckeown worked with a group of participants from COPE Foundation and other disability organisations to create a collaborative work based around stop frame animation, shadow puppetry, art work and video.
Work from this workshop directly and indirectly influenced the content created by Mckeown's team for the Cork Ignite projection. His creative team included Craig McMullen, sound specialist Nigel Crooks, concept artist Kameliya Minkova, Phillip Wray, and David Archibold.
To realise Simon's idea of creating a building projection on the exterior of Cork College of Commerce, he contacted PRG XL Video senior account manager, Paul Wood who put together the technical specifications for projection and playback.
First, PRG XL Video's team, including mapping expert James Cooksey, created a map of the building using a combination of building drawings and photographs for the content renderings.
Once the map was complete, Mckeown's team formatted their content to match the building map, and the completed content was played-back using Milumin media servers, and Mad Mapper for final mapping tweaks on-site.
To cover the entire front of the College of Commerce, six Barco HDQ-2K40 projectors were used in two stacks of three, outputting a total of 240,000 Lumens! These were installed and aligned by PRG XL's Projectionist Peter Tilling.
Two nights before the main event, projector alignment was carried out, and a content run-through/rehearsal took place the night before the event.
Simon said, "This was a big outdoor project which carried a lot of risk and uncertainty and expectation. The project formed the ambitious centre point to Culture Night Ireland in Cork. It had prestigious support from organisations in Ireland and the UK and was hoped to have a very large audience. Expectations were high and combining this stress with my own exacting standards meant that I could only consider working with PRG XL and Paul and his team."
Mckeown continues, "Over several months I worked with Paul to specify the projection and with James to map the work to a fantastically accurate level across multiple planar depths. As nearly a quarter of a million lumens hit the College of Commerce I was, and still remain, absolutely certain I made the correct decision. Simply stunning."
(Jim Evans)
