UK - Wyatt Enever, photographer, projection specialist and one-time managing director of DHA Lighting Ltd, has since spent the last nine months developing Studio Wyatt. In doing so he is returning to his roots as a photographer and exercising over 30 years of accumulated experience in innovative and traditional projection techniques.
Based near Guildford, Studio Wyatt offers consultancy and in-house production of all formats of projection slides - from 35mm through 18cm x 18cm for Pani and E/T/C Pigi projectors, to the 240mm x 240mm required for Pani 12k projectors - using both photographic and computer graphics.
It may have come as a surprise to some that Enever decided to take this route after so many years at DHA Lighting. "When I entered the lighting industry 25 years ago, DHA Lighting was a three-person operation which rose to become the market leader in the gobo business. This phenomenal growth was largely due to customer focus and meticulous attention to detail," he explains. "Establishing a relationship with the client and taking time to understand precisely what a customer needs in advance of any production are key factors to success and allow me to decide or create solutions to answer a need."
Enever himself became a major figure in the development and design of metal and glass gobos and many of the techniques used today were developed and honed by him. However, he continues: "As the company expanded to over 40 staff, my position as joint managing director meant my attention was increasingly diverted to management issues. I was unable to concentrate on the core business - the development and design of gobo and slide production - which is where I feel I have most to offer."
So, in February 2005, when discussions between DHA Lighting and Rosco were inevitably leading to a merger of the two companies, Enever reappraised his own future too: "It was time for me to go it alone and return to my roots in photography."
Enever uses the latest specialist equipment, including a film recorder which outputs high resolution full colour transparencies from digital files. Rarely are images submitted as flat artwork but arrive electronically in the form of jpeg, tiff or eps files. The film recorder transforms these electronic formats into the real film images required to print onto Cibachrome. Studio Wyatt is one of the few remaining studios in the UK to develop and print Cibachrome, the high temperature-resistant colour transparency film which lies behind images such as those of VSFX discs, and the large-scale projections favoured by some of Enever's clients: "By having all the systems in-house, I have full control of any stage of any process from the digital file to the film processing, printing and mounting, which, for the customer, guarantees top-class quality control and short turn-around times," he says.
This year's projection projects include the National Theatre's Henry IV, Great Expectations for the RSC and La Rondine for the Royal Northern College of Music. Henry IV used three Pani projectors front-projecting onto separate letterbox-shape screens, and each needed keystone correction to compensate for the projector's offset position. Enever calculated a single-plane distortion correction for the centre screen and a double-plane distortion correction for the two outer screens. Artwork was supplied as digital files which were corrected for shape in the Studio, output through the film recorder and finally printed to Cibachrome.
Both the RSC and the Royal Northern College productions used back projection onto a curved cyc from a very short distance. In order to align the images to create a seamless panoramic image, Enever specified the optimum projector positions and applied curve and keystone correction to achieve best c
