Lighting the Sydney Opera House Sails

[Chris Kenny]

We provided a Red camera and 4K color/workflow services to artist Laurie Anderson for the large-scale architectural projections onto the sails of the Sydney Opera House going on now at the VIVID LIVE festival, curated this year by Laurie Anderson and Lou Reed. The project was shot by director, cinematographer and SXSW Film Festival Audience Award Winner Jody Lee Lipes.

Projection is by the architectural projection specialists at Electric Canvas.

See more photos, video, more video, or a live video stream.

This was a fun project. And another compelling answer to the "Why would I ever need more than 1080p?" question. :laugh:

 

[Brian Timmons]

Very cool work!
Could you explain what the workflow was for this type of project?

Brian Timmons
britim-media

 

[Sanjin Jukic]

Amazing art project!

 

[Andrew Gentle]

Awesome! Where are the projectors? On the bridge or down near Circular Quay?

 

[Chris Kenny]

I know the projection is probably the most technically interesting part of this project. Unfortunately, I didn't get any closer to Sydney than Brooklyn, so I don't know much about that except what formats Electric Canvas needed from us.

In terms of general workflow, it was a bit of an... adventure on this project. Everything was super rushed and the requirements ended up getting changed a couple of times. We ended up color grading in RedCine-X, with Laurie Anderson and her team working with 1080p ProRes 422 files as the offline in Final Cut. We then exported with the same color to 4K ProRes 4444 and re-linked their edits.

After these sequences were rendered out of Final Cut, they were split into four separate video files each -- one for each of the main sails -- via carefully constructed Compressor presets, and delivered in Animation codec, which the Electric Canvas guys then encoded to MPEG-2 for their playback system. We basically delivered a few dozen 5-10 minute clips. The Electric Canvas system allowed them, once encoded, to be sequenced directly in the playback system, providing a lot of flexibility to rearrange things on-site.

There was a bit of a mishap with Compressor that resulted in some frame rate issues and required some last-minute scrambling, but all in all given that there was basically a week and a half to get through all of the editing/rendering/splitting/encoding, and we didn't have a RedRocket because it was stolen off of a FedEx truck, we managed pretty well I think.

 

[Jason Joseph]

I was there! and i thought it was pretty cool, could have used some piped music though.

i believe the projectors were at the Overseas Passenger Arrivals Terminal which is opposite the opera house.

nice job!