Skills Popcicle @ Bill Graham (SF)

www.vjculture.com
Photos courtesy of
http://www.seanleeweb.com/pics/v/popsicle2006/?g2_page=17
Popsicle was a Skills production at the Bill Graham Auditorium in San Francisco.
Over 8000 kids showed up on a cold rainy night.
I arrived in San Francisco at 8:00AM from SLC. I picked up Casey Bishop from Simplisks visuals at 9:00AM and we began our setup for this event.
In the main room are 4 15x20ft screens hung off of truss vertically, plus one circular screen. We had 4 5K projectors hitting the vertical screens and one 7K projector hitting the circular screen.
The challenge was setting up the projectors to hit the screens vertically. We had to mount all the projectors on their side so the content would match the vertical screens. Then I had to have all my content rotated 90 degrees so that it wasn't sideways. All the live cameras were also mounted on their side. I ran the content through a Edirol V4 mixer that fed into a analog to digital converter to send the feed into a firewire input into Arkaos. Arkaos rotated the content and then spit it out through VGA into the Edirol HD440 High Def mixer. The HD 440 has incredible scaling capabilities for each input. I was then able to strech the content out to perfectly fill all the screens.
Additionally, I had to send one feed to the circular screen that wasn't rotated 90 degrees. So I couldn't keep all the content the same on all the screens. So one channel of the output from the V4 went to the circular screen non-rotated.
In the DnB room we had 3 9x12ft screens mounted directly above the DJ booth. Casey Bishop rocked the DnB all night long.
The party ended at 5:00AM, we had to strike until 10:00AM. It turned out to be a 26 hour setup, show and strike.
That same night I had to catch a "redeye" to New York for a 10:00AM planning meeting Monday morning.