Houses of Parliament projection mapping honours the NHS
Messages of thanks have been projected onto the Houses of Parliament to shine a light on the sterling work of NHS staff during the pandemic.
The Houses of Parliament have been transformed into a giant canvas by Motion Mapping, who projected a message and striking visuals to thank the NHS staff working on the front line. NHS England and Parliament UK also wanted to light up the Houses of Parliament to celebrate International Nurses Day and Florence Nightingale’s 200th birthday at the Florence Nightingale Museum.
Projection specialists Motion Mapping work with a range of creative, marketing and event agencies and offers white labelling as one of their services. The Houses of Parliament project came to fruition after one of their regular partners ESP (Extraordinary Spatial Performance) was approached by Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust to carry out projections, having seen previous projects that had been carried out by the partners.
“We produced projections on Ipswich hospital in the middle of March which triggered a wave of NHS and thank you projections. As we have lots of family and friends who are key workers it felt a very fitting way to contribute,” said Stuart Harris, creative director, Motion Mapping.
The process
At two working days, the project timescale was very short, during which time the content had to go through a lot of stages to get final signoff. It was also essential the content was simple but effective and easy to adapt onsite.
“Once we were asked to carry the project out, we put a call out to our regular suppliers and partners to ensure we could produce the event in such a short time frame,” said Harris.
“The press call was at 21.45 and we wouldn’t see anything on the building until around 21.10. This left us with a very short window to line up, focus, blend, overlay the four projectors and then get content up and running, said Harris. “As the event had been approved by parliament, we were able to liaise with their team and get all the building lights turned off to enable the best result.”
Stage Sound Services supplied projectors and other key elements for the event. A total of four Panasonic RZ31 projectors with long throw lenses were chosen due to their high brightness, relatively small form factor, easily interchangeable lens range and vibrant colour reproduction.
Having recently invested in more media servers and equipment, Motion Mapping used their own control systems – Green Hippo Amba media servers which offered the required software tools, flexibility and scalability.
“The Green Hippo range offers so much, meaning we use these servers very regularly, from pre-programmed shows to those that are a little more fluid in their design and operation,” said Harris. “There are some brilliant image manipulation tools within the servers that can reduce the need to have a large edit and render team on site.”
Datapath FX4s were used for splitting the single output of the media server into four individual SDI components with relative ease and a high level of reliability.
Astera lighting was then used for DMX controlled uplighting at control to add wireless and battery powered ambience to the scene being created and adding to atmosphere.
The key to creating mapping magic
According to Harris, effective planning is essential for successful projection mapping as well as constantly thinking about how to make improvements.
“Having control over the lighting of the projection area is also important,” he added. “Flexibility is also crucial because no matter how much planning you do you’re almost guaranteed to come across a curve ball whilst on site, from an over zealous individual determined to get in the way of your projection position through to a tree that didn’t make it onto the site plan.
“It’s good to be flexible and to be able to roll with it and move your projection position, tweak content, delay the fit up time and work later into the night or whatever it may be, without getting agitated.”
Keeping optimistic
Although the pandemic has had a big impact on live events the Motion Mapping team are optimistic about the future.
“The great thing about projection is that people don’t have to be close to it and is a lot more versatile than something like LED walls, so there are more opportunities to work through and develop,” said Harris.
“We’ve had plenty of enquiries during the last two weeks and we are in conversations regarding a lot of projects, especially OOH advertising such as large format/guerrilla projections which have given advertisers and film makers ideas for what they can achieve using this technique.”
One such example is the guerilla projections the company created for composer Hans Zimmer and Alan Walker’s new music video ‘Time’ which was simple but effective and socially distant and saw them projecting into various London landmarks such as Tate Britain and Marble Arch.
“The last few months have been challenging but we have come out of this stronger than before and have a great year lined up – Covid-19 dependant),” says Harris.
“There are projects that include travel to other countries which are still going ahead and we’ll use our resilience to make sure that in a years time we are bigger and better than before the lockdown. In January, we moved from 250sq ft into a 3,500sq ft premises which gives us the opportunity to expand what we can offer, room to develop ideas and plan out projects with clients onsite or remotely.”
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Posted: 17th June 2020