This week has seen a whole host of emailed links pinging back and forth between Creative and Digital featuring the latest trickery in building projection and I promised to share some of them more widely. If anyone watched the opening ceremony of last year’s Winter Olympics, you’ll have seen just how far animated projection has come as a technique. Buried in amongst the Inuit acrobats and grizzly bears on stilts was a great demo of just how realistic projection now is.
And building projection has taken the advances in animation a step further. It wasn’t that long ago that BBH were getting into trouble for projecting an image of Gail Porter onto the Houses of Parliament. But as I reminded the creative team last week, technology has moved on, and as Aerosmith have discovered, you can do this sort of thing on the outside of Rochester Castle. (Fast forward to the end – 3 minutes plus – for the jaw-dropping stuff.)
For the technically minded, the way it works is that real buildings are mapped and modelled in 3D and then animations are created from them and projected back on to the building. Clever stuff, not least because as well as being incredibly lifelike, the animations incorporate the quirks and characteristics of the buildings that are their backdrop. So now it seems almost anything is possible, from this interactive building-size pinball game to this wonderful examples of a 3D building projection for Samsung.
Now projection is a fairly under-used technique in our industry. PwC picked up a RAD award a few years ago for projecting their campaign logo on a student union, but after that the channel seemed to stop developing. All of which suggests the time might be ripe for introducing a little BMW-type projection magic to people comms.
And if you’re interested in the area, then you’re be able to learn more about Seeper the people who developed the BMW and other animated extravaganzas at their site. Or, alternatively, you can listen to them in person, as they’ll be coming in to chat to the agency in late August. More details to follow.
A happy weekend to one and all – I just hope your break isn’t as full on as mine. The evidence suggests those Latvian stag dos can be quite eventful (scroll down the page for the full Lederhosen mankini horror.)