TDC (Technical Direction Company) is bringing its large format video projection technology to St Mary’s Cathedral and the Commercial Travellers Association Building in Martin Place, both in Sydney.
For the St Mary’s Cathedral project, which runs from 10-25 December, TDC has turned the façade into a 75m backdrop that represents what Christmas means to Sydney. TDC has created giant 17,640,000 pixel animated images, which will utilise 264,000 lumens of projected light to illuminate the building.
To manage the full HD content images, TDC requires 2TB of content management processing power, 48 cores of processing and 144GB of RAM.
“TDC projection video designers created special code and electronics so that the entire system is ‘virtually wired’ and controllable using an iPad device,” said Michael Hassett, managing director at TDC. “Remote monitoring is something TDC has been perfecting for a number of years. It allows for rapid programming, fixes issues remotely in real-time, uses a CCTV camera on-site to see what’s happening and allows scheduling of different shows and operation of each days events.”
“Projectors can be turned on or off or even climate control systems can be activated for heating and cooling of all equipment – let’s face it, Sydney can get hot sometimes,” said Steve Cain, head technician at TDC.
Event content, original content and production was by AGB Events. “The animations have three themes based around life and light,” stated Anthony Bastic, director at AGB Events. “TDC are back this year with bigger and brighter projectors. Their expertise enables us to have unlimited creativity with our artwork.”
Merry Go Round returns this year to the Commercial Travellers Association Building in Martin Place and runs from 1 December until Christmas Day.
The project utilises video projection from TDC and content from Ample Projects to make the giant curved concrete façade appear to spin and pop. The cast of dancing robots and singing mechanical animals swing into action, before the building packs itself up and blasts off into space as a flying saucer with Christmas lights.
“As with all of our collaborations with TDC, we are very proud of this award-winning artistic and technical achievement. This show presented new design challenges, and we are so proud of the result. We couldn’t have done it without our technical partners, TDC,” concluded Nicholas Tory, creative director at Ample Projects.
Images courtesy of TDC
