Elton John may be retiring from touring but not before he says good-bye to fans on a massive, 300-show worldwide tour dubbed, “Farewell Yellow Brick Road.” John made the announcement at New York City’s Gotham Hall where event producers Spinifex Group called on WorldStage to projection map the walls and dome of the event space where John performed “Tiny Dancer” and “I’m Still Standing.”
Torrance, California-based Spinifex Group staged the entire event, created the media and opened the proceedings with an immersive VR experience of their own devising that provided a dynamic look back at the singer’s biggest hits. Fans at the Troubadour in Los Angeles and a venue in London watched a live stream of the Gotham Hall event while thousands more tuned in on YouTube.
WorldStage was tasked with providing video projection mapping for Gotham Hall, a neo-classical building dating from the 1920s that once housed the Greenwich Savings Bank and now serves as an event space in midtown Manhattan. The oval-shaped interior is a clear span with a coffered dome ceiling with a skylight at its apex.
“We projection mapped the walls, including the four architectural columns behind the stage, which comprised more than a 270º space,” says WorldStage Account Executive Lars Pedersen. “We also mapped the dome up to the perimeter of the skylight, which had not been done at that venue before. The key was using an extremely accurate 3D model we had created from a laser scan of the interior space in order to locate the projectors and make sure all the intended surfaces were covered.”
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WorldStage used Christie Boxer 4K30 projectors to accomplish the feat. The 30,000 lumen, 3DLP projectors with 4K resolution were fed by disguise 4x4pro media servers.
The laser-scan model also provided the basis for content previsualization. “We shared the model data with Spinifex and tested the content they created by loading it into the disguise media server platform before arriving on site,” says Pedersen. “It was a collaborative effort between WorldStage and a number of Spinifex offices around the world.”
“Lars and the WorldStage guys were great to work with,” says Lang Walker, Technical Director at Spinifex. “There was tight coordination between WorldStage, the disguise operators and our 3D team, and the result was an amazing job!”
At WorldStage Peter Smith and Carson Polan-Volpe were the Project Managers, Michael Kohler and Patrick Angle the disguise programmers, and Denis Alfonso and Juan Mateo the Projectionists.
