The Question Mark Inside was commissioned by the Dean and Chapter of St Paul's, and involved projecting video texts onto three separate locations at the Cathedral. Outside, this was onto the south elevation of the dome and the West Front at Ludgate Hill, and inside, around the famous Whispering Gallery.
Firrell's text included blog postings from the public plus comments from interviews he conducted with some of the UK's foremost thinkers and his own observations. All were based on the question: "What are the things that make life meaningful and what does St Paul's mean in contemporary contexts to us in 2008?"
XL has worked with Firrell on previous projection projects at the Royal Opera House and the National Portrait Gallery. Firrell and his production manager Simon MacColl once again approached XL's Des Fallon to supply the technical solutions.
At The Dome, three Christie Roadster 20+ projectors were rigged on the roof balcony of the Goldman Sachs building that is in line with Millennium Bridge which traverses the River Thames. The projectors were overlaid to produce one mega-bright image 35m wide, beaming single words onto the base of the dome. Also projected was a sweeping blue line, which is Firrell's signature.
Three Catalyst digital media servers - one at each location - were utilised to store and run all the various text video files which totalled over 200. Catalyst was also used to achieve all the necessary warping to wrap the text around the curvature of the dome.
On the West Face, three Barco FLM 20s driven by a Catalyst system were stationed in front of St Paul's and behind the Queen Anne statue on a scissor lift platform. They were powered by their own genny, and everything had to be struck each night and re-aligned the next day for the eight-day installation.
At the Whispering Gallery, the XL team's projection spec was limited by the physical size of the minute access tunnels leading to the Gallery, through which the projectors had to be hand carried.
The largest machines they could squeeze through were Barco R12 SLMs, so two of these and a G10 were rigged on a specially built scaffolding projection tower 10ft above the Gallery floor. These were triple stacked with images overlaid to create the 19 metre wide image texts projected onto the Gallery's inner curve, covering half the diameter of the space.
(Jim Evans)
