ARRAY

I worked on several sections of an animation for a projection mapping piece called ‘Array’. It was produced by 59 Productions and took place in the Beech street tunnel in central London. The music was a piece called Karawane composed by Esa-Pekka Salonen.

The idea was to create an "immersive audio-visual feast to place audience members inside a piece of contemporary classical music".

I was asked to help create a number of audio responsive sections for the piece, a more perfect brief I couldn’t have written myself. I explored a number of techniques within Houdini to allow the animation to represent and react to the music. I used the actually audio files, MIDI and good old fashioned keyframing to drive these animations.

Once the mechanics were defined in Houdini I rendered the pieces in Cinema 4D and X-Particles with compositing in After Effects.

One of the challenges was to produce content for the massive resolution of the piece. Working at a resolution of 17,300 x 3,840 pixels meant effects and rendering had to be kept simple and smart.

It was also a challenge to visualise how the piece would actually look in the venue but fortunately 59 Productions had a VR setup connected to the output server to allow us to preview our animations.

A detailed write up on the project with full credits can be found on 59 Productions website.