For the month of Feb. I was working on a project for the New York Red Bull’s. The event was called “Fotbal de Calle”. (Freestyle Soccer or, juggling soccer balls in a B-boy battle format). The challenge was to create a unique screen installation that incorporated the soccer theme and the four live camera feeds on the players.
In this photo I’m experimenting with a jitter matrix routing patch built by my good buddy “Parts” (John Taylor).
Checkout the warehouse… I’ve been granted this 40,000 sq ft warehouse for the next few months for free, curtsey of Liza at Phantom Galleries.
I’m using 5 dell projectors, a dual core Intel 2.66ghz machine with dual graphics cards and doublehead2go and a triplehead2go card on each graphic card.
Since I don’t have wifi at the warehouse I was running back and worth to the coffee shop downloading new patches being updated by “Parts”.
Instead of shipping my Apple desktop to NYC I borrowed my good friends at C-trl Labs machine, which is identical to mine.
We had 2 days to setup at Webster Hall. I arrived on Thursday night Feb. The show was on Sunday night Feb. We worked long hours for 3 days setting up
Michael Byrnes and team from 3rd Ward (Brooklyn) did an amazing job of event design, and logo treatments. His team also built the pentagon shaped screens, bleachers and stage.
My team consisted of Guilaume Clave (Gui"Aum"etriX), Larry Akiya and Devan from C-trl Labs.
The idea for the installation was to have the 4 incoming video signals and 1 quick time movie masked and routed to each individual screen. Whenever I tapped the space bar on the keyboard it would re-route the camera feeds and movie to the next pentagon screen. So the various camera feeds were rotating clockwise around the center stage. The jitter patch was also setup to rotate automatically by keeping tempo to the music. (This was accomplished via a tap tempo on the space bar).
Ocean Watch provided all the live camera feeds. They brought in track w/ a dolly that went half way around the stage and a 30ft boom mounted camera and two hand helds. All camera feeds came into the Apple desktop via DFG 1394 fire wire capture box. These little units allow to you capture uncompressed 640x480 QuickTime.
I had to add an extra graphics card to accommodate the four streams of video coming into the machine.
Once in jitter a pentagon mask was laid over the live feed and then it was routed out to the various screens.
We used Dell 2400MP projectors (3000) lumens attached to magic arms, which were then attached to the truss. The nice thing about the Dell’s is that you can save a screen shot as a default image when the projector looses a signal. So if your computer goes down or something gets unplugged before it gets to the projector you can still have an event logo as a screen shot. (It’s also a good idea to change your desktop image as well.
We were having issues with Jitter before the show. It can be very finicky about the process and the order you do it in. We were a couple of hours from show time and Jitter was hanging up on us and not recognizing the DFG units. Then just before the show started everything started working and it stayed stable throughout the show.
Again, hats off to Michael Bryne’s team for all their hard work and there planning.
