This is the second year for the event, but it has grown exponentially, and now uses the listed buildings of the Council House as the backdrop for 400ft (122m) scenic projections of animation and moving images. The event has been put together by Bristol Media, the city's creative networking and support organisation, and the West of England Design Forum, who invited a team of 14 of the city's leading creatives from companies including Aardman Animations, E3, Beef, Oakwood DC, Thirteen and MCcann Erickson to work alongside each other on the project.
"Designers tend to spend our lives working on a 19 inch monitor, so to be asked to produce 400ft animations and visuals that are going to be thrown all over the city, hell yes, we all jumped at the chance," says Dan Efergan, digital creative director of Aardman Animations.
The performance capabilities of Christie's 20,000 ANSI lumen projectors gave PSL the opportunity to show off its expertise in the field of large-format scenic projection. Adam Seaman from Blackout Arts was responsible for overseeing the video elements of the project. "This was the first time we provided video content, and the Christie projectors stood up very nicely in terms of brightness."
The full 130m (427ft) width of Bristol's Council House on College Green was covered by six Christie Roadster S+20K projectors, sited on a tower built on the Green which also housed the central switching unit, accepting inputs from computers equipped with Matrox TripleHead graphics cards. This enabled the division of images into one frame per each of the six projectors, although the final projection appears as a single seamless image.
PSL's commitment to the Bristol project was praised by Adam Seaman: "I have worked with PSL at the Big Chill Festival and found them to be people who understand our world, rather than corporate event types. The fact that they all have so much enthusiasm for the job is what makes PSL stand out from the competition."
(Jim Evans)
