London’s famous Palace of Westminster became a vast projection surface in May to coincide with International Nurses Day, as a series of images thanking NHS key workers were beamed onto the iconic building from 260 meters away across the Thames.
Projection experts at Motion Mapping deployed two Green Hippo Hippotizer Amba+ Media Servers to blend and warp the visual content and four 30,000-lumen Panasonic projectors to display the imagery onto the intricate façade of the building. Motion Mapping’s Stuart Harris said he made good use of Hippotizer’s SHAPE feature to achieve the results.
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“We had just 45 minutes on site to get the projection right, including all alignment and blending with the framework of Parliament, to going live with the world’s press covering the event,” Harris said. “SHAPE made it simple to warp and blend the images so that they appeared correctly, even while being beamed from such a long distance away. We even had to do some of this in real time, and the Amba+ servers handled it with ease.
“Hippo features such as Advanced Media Management and Timeline enabled us to change and amend quickly on site—it’s so agile and flexible. And when an issue arose, such as a light being left on in one of the windows inside Parliament, I could create a workaround in seconds, which is very handy when images are about to be broadcast around the world.”
The visual content varied from messages of thanks to three-story-high pictures of famed founder of modern nursing Florence Nightingale, to coincide with the 200th anniversary of her birth.
“As you might expect, there was a lot of pre-event red tape to get through, which included approvals about kit from the highest levels within Parliament,” Harris said. “But on site, we only had one go at getting it spot on so I needed a reliable and simple-to-set-up server solution, and Hippotizer provided the right tool for the job.”
