We’ve Got You Surrounded

With the demands on audio visual producers to stretch their imagination to more innovative ideas, Ian Andrew Walsh and his company G1 Productions have carved out a niche delivering a projected environment that surrounds and immerses an audience. Loosely dubbed 360° projection, the system, as the name suggests, uses multiple surfaces and multiple projectors with image-combining technology to complete the seamless picture. projects with as many as 10 projectors, but they are currently in the planning stages of a job using as many as 12 projectors. Walsh believes the successful use of the technology can be measured by how you integrate the theme into the presentation. He cites this example: “On a recent charity event, themed as a Venetian Masquerade, we created a storybook feel in which the guests appeared as characters on the pages. “We generally end up creating content from scratch and have to come up with creative ways of using media. If you can imagine, when you’re creating content for a room that is 128 metres around and eight metres high, your ratios are pretty extreme. One of the hardest challenges is ensuring the attention to detail, especially when you build the content from scratch in 3D and then export to video. But we are very Watchout, and this is a fantastic system to work with. However, like any type of design work, you need to ensure your media is driven by gutsy machines, as such, excellent servers are required,” Walsh said. Due to the size of these productions (4,000 – 14,000 pixels wide) much of the image creation is undertaken in packages such as Photoshop, Maya and Cinema 4D.

Following that, the content is composited capabilities of Watchout. Walsh notes: “Some producers use Watchout purely as a movie replay device, without considering how to utilise all of its features to save production and rendering. In our case, once the creative is complete, we often sit down with our Watchout programmer, Mal Padgett, to work out the best way to create the content. “Sometimes we use large-format ‘still’ and sometimes it is only once you see the show set up in its entirety that you can fully appreciate the overall effect. Watchout – Swedish Army Knife