Expressions of America
In 2021 LightAct was approached by Solomon Group, an experiential production company behind some of the biggest cultural events, broadcasts and media-driven experiences.
They were working on a large-scale projection mapping on the façade of The National Museum of WWII in New Orleans, Louisiana, USA and they called upon LightAct to provide hardware and software for projection mapping and video playback. The projection is a permanent feature of the museum and is called Expressions of America.
The content was produced by Medici Media (formerly Mousetrappe) and was officially open on the Veterans Day on 11. November 2022 with several WWII veterans flown in for the ceremony.
For this project, Solomon Group chose 3 Sync 5000 servers which provided ample power for video playback and projection mapping for this project. The projection uses six Panasonic 4096 x 2160 and two Panasonic 5120×3200 projectors which project content on five facades with the overall resolution of the content exceeding 18,700 x 17,350 px.
This project was one of the first ones where LightAct 4 was used, so LightAct development and support teams were working incredibly hard and hand-in-hand with Solomon Group, to develop and polish projection mapping and multi-server features required for this project.
Mitja Prelovšek, CEO of LightAct said: “This was the first large-scale LightAct 4 project which meant that inevitably, several glitches were discovered during the show programming phase. However, thanks to the hard work of our dev and support teams, all the issues were rectified well before the official opening of the show.”
Before and during this project, LightAct’s projector calibration feature called 3DCal was massively improved, as well as NotchLC video playback. LightNet multi-server functionalities also made a giant leap ahead and became much more robust and user-friendly.
Barry Mendelson, AV Programmer at Solomon Group, was able to perform all the programming on the Primary server with the 2 Secondaries executing every action without any delay. During the show, all 3 servers are following external timecode MIF4 in perfect sync.
Equipment
Servers: | 3 x Sync 5000 |
Projectors: | 6 x Panasonic PT-RQ50K |
1 x Panasonic PT-RQ32K | |
1 x Panasonic PT-RQ20K | |