Friday, February 18, 2011

Boxing Clever -- a WinWin Group conference for Unilever

Thanks to the genius of David and Steve at the WinWin Group, Unilever had what must rank as one of the most exciting and DIFFERENT conferences ever!

My role on the production was to provide visual facilitation for Gary McGaghey.

This pic was taken by one of the crew members. He was stationed up near the ceiling to capture video and stills of the event.

What you're seeing is roughly half of the room. The entire space is a massive square, just on 22 x 22 x 22 x 22 metres. It's about 2.5 to 3 stories tall. The screens are all joined, with uninterrupted pictures on all four surfaces. It's built from scratch in one of the Durban International Conference Centre spaces.

Dean Foure of Integrity, the company that provides the projection system, tells me that it took the rigging crew almost four full days AND nights to get the structure set up. And it's HUNDREDS of tons of wood and scaffolding.

Dean says it takes almost twelve hours to get all eight projectors EXACTLY balanced, colour-matched, aligned. And those eight projectors cost R10 million. (Each one is about the size of half a Fiat Uno.)

I've worked on big screens before. But never anything on this scale. And, as it happens, this is the first time anything this big has ever been seen in South Africa.

Gary's talk had a boxing theme. So that's me in the foreground in boxing garb. And all of my pictures were boxing-related.

I pre-drew almost everything, with two layers... a before layer, and a final-state layer. I then used my eraser tool to 'live-erase' the before layer stuff out of the way to reveal what lies beneath.

At the same time, I was moving the canvas into a new position every few seconds to stay in sync with Gary's talk.

Audience loved it. Client loved it. WinWin loved it. I loved it. That's a lot of love.

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