Uralita 100 Year Anniversary
Madrid – June 14th, 2007 – the highest peak in a year of celebratory activities for Grupo Uralita, one of Spain leading lights in construction – and at 100 years old, one of its most established.
Sold Out Media’s Paco Caraballo explained the concept “To mark the Centenary date, Uralita threw an intimate birthday party for a select group of ‘just’ 700 luminaries from the Spanish worlds of business, commerce and politics. The event was held in Madrid’s 82,000m2 Sports Palace. The Sports Palace is a vast landscape, and for the company it was very important the guests were all treated equally. By using 360° projection, it was the most democratic way to project and by covering every surface it was easier to avoid and forget the actual venue and create the intimate party space”.
Guests were cocooned within a perimeter wall of projection screens, which created a generic cityscape backdrop for the dinner – across a total canvass area of 19,000pixels(W) x 720pixels(H). In keeping with the anniversary, images represented past, present and future with scenery fluidly moving from vintage panoramas of old buildings, through natural vistas of the present, to more architectural views of the future.
Creative Technology supplied 16 Barco FLM HD18 high definition projectors from their new fleet, each working with a 14.5m(W) x 8m(H) soft edge blended screen that formed a segment of the 224 metre circular canvas. Nick Whitehead, CT project manager for the event, was responsible for the projector positioning and rigging layout within the confines of the available rigging points. “The projection layout was a task in itself – and it took some time to achieve optimum projector positioning – due to the tight nature of the screen curves and the constraints of the flown truss rig”.
Creative Technology’s Dave Boeck, who programmed the show, gives an insight into some of the main challenges the event provided, “projecting a flat image to a curved background would be a challenge, but also the sheer scale of the screen proportions would prove to be a major consideration. We also needed to ensure the data could be easily accessed, so that at a moment’s notice, should the night’s itinerary timings change for any reason, the backdrop could be updated, or new elements of video could be mixed into the current landscape.”
To feed the 16-channel projection system, CT supplied a Dataton Watchout software system. Signal distribution to the 16 projectors was achieved using one of CT’s DVI fibre systems routed via a DVI matrix to enable the rerouting of back up Watchout Channels if required. (In the event it wasn’t – the system ran smoothly throughout) Dave Boeck confirms, “Watchout allows you to place media on to a timeline, it also corrects the image for the curvature of the screen and blends at the projection edges, plus it enables the flexibility of running different file formats simultaneously and pulling new images up at the touch of a button.” As Caraballo from Sold Out Media credits, they witnessed how to “make the possible from the impossible thanks to Dave Boeck and Gary Holford at CT London”.
The event was installed with no less than 105 rigging points. All cabling and equipment was flown to increase the illusion of a familial scene. The bold set up, which utilised a mixture of James Thomas and Prolyte truss, with Verlinde’s Stagemaker motor hoists, was developed by Head of Production and SOM! founder, Amancio Macia, whose extensive and detailed pre-production planning contributed wholly to the comparatively short six-day set up period.
Sold Out Media, who essentially transformed one of the largest, yet most uninspiring interiors in Europe, into an intimate micro-fiesta atmosphere, using only their laptop computers – no mean feat! – remain modestly self-effacing as, in Paco Caraballo’s words, “the most important thing in this job is not to stop creating good teams of people and to include them in the whole project, not just part of it, The success of one is the success of everybody!”