The Muybridge Festival celebrated the life and works of Eadweard Muybridge, one of the finest pioneering Victorian photographers who was born in Kingston in April 1830. The majority of his highly acclaimed experimental work was completed in America, and Muybridge is credited with being a founding father of modern cinema.
XL Video supplied three 17,000 lumen Barco ELM R18 projectors to transform Kingston High Street into a public gallery for two evenings as part of a wider series of Muybridge events and exhibitions.
Artistic director Robin Hutchison conceived the project, and projection was co-ordinated by Chris Birch of One 80 Degrees. HFM's Mick Scullion co-organized the production infrastructure and audio with XL Video's Paul Wood. Each projection measured 16m wide by 13m high. One R18 was trained centrally on the building's front portal, and the other two were lined up to flank either side, effectively wrapping the entire building in moving images. All three showed 15-minute loops, stored on two Doremi hard drives, with the two side projections being identical but different from the central images.
The specially created films were produced using original glass plates from the Muybridge archive, edited together in a series of inspirational animations made by Kingston University postgraduates combined with footage of contemporary dance artist Bode Lawler. The projectors were housed in three four-metre high weatherproof towers standing 15m away from the building, and the main road was closed for approximately six hours. Despite atrocious weather both evenings, over 500 people turned out to view the event.
After eighteen months of planning and pre-production, the first ever Muybridge Festival Projection was a phenomenal success and has established Kingston as a cultural hub for future innovative film related projects. The Festival, aimed at promoting talented young filmmakers, artists and composers, is now set to become an annual event.
XL's Wood said: "This was an excellent project to be involved with on several counts - because of the event's challenging nature, the relevance of the subject material to our industry and the fact that we were presenting historical cinematic images within a contemporary context."
For HFM Lighting, Scullion comments, "It was a hard call for the crew who battled tirelessly against gale force winds and torrential rain to deliver a spectacular show over the two nights. The end result was superb."
(Sarah Rushton-Read)
